In response to those who complained in my recent post that linear trends are not a good way to compare the models to observations (even though the modelers have claimed that it’s the long-term behavior of the models we should focus on, not individual years), here are running 5-year averages for the tropical tropospheric temperature, models versus observations (click for full size):
In this case, the models and observations have been plotted so that their respective 1979-2012 trend lines all intersect in 1979, which we believe is the most meaningful way to simultaneously plot the models’ results for comparison to the observations.

In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks (e.g. Spencer & Braswell, 2010). The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue…just one that is becoming more glaring over time.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the coming years. I frankly don’t see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models are “not inconsistent with” the observations. Any sane person can see otherwise.

If the observations in the above graph were on the UPPER (warm) side of the models, do you really believe the modelers would not be falling all over themselves to see how much additional surface warming they could get their models to produce?

Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change…yet they now, ironically, have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!

Forgive me if I sound frustrated, but we scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication by the ‘humans-cause-everything-bad-that-happens’ juggernaut. The public who funds their work will not stand for their willful blindness much longer.

Easy to understand why you might sound frustrated. If IPCC scientists were able to explain why long term natural variability doesn’t exist, or couldn’t have caused some or most of modern warming, they would have done so by now. The best they seem able to muster is the willful misrepresentation of arguments against their view.

If you look at the chart of global average surface temperature over the last century, there were times when it fell rather sharply and stayed lower over a period of a decade or more. For example, 1940 to 1980.

Why should I be convinced by a period of level surface temperatures for less than 2 decades that ever-growing CO2 levels are not a risk to the well being of my children?

This is a moral issue, not a science issue. We can have a dispassionate debate about the Higgs Boson. But for now, we are changing the atmosphere, and if we break, we cannot fix it.

So I really don’t care if surface temperature has leveled off for a while. I want to stop changing the atmosphere.

Furthermore, the oceans keep rising and faster than predicted. Surface temperature isn’t the only metric.

Nice Freudian slip. But yes, this isn’t about science. The global warming believers want to get as far away from the science as possible. “Because we say so” is the only argument for AGW that you can offer.

What would ever make the science certain? A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in which we inject CO2 or an inert gas into large sample of Earth-like planets?

Even in the face of a rapidly melting Arctic and rising oceans, I see people saying it is natural, although I haven’t seen any statistical analysis showing long-term correlation between temperature and any such natural cause. In this regard, Richard Muller’s work is the most definitive I know, and it shows the only strong correlation is with CO2.

So as a moral issue, if we cannot definitively prove that rising CO2 will not warm the planet excessively, we have a responsibility to stabilize CO2 levels.

Previous generations made big sacrifices in the name of moral principles and for the sake of future generations. But here we are, with people who complain about using more efficient light bulbs.

“So as a moral issue, if we cannot definitively prove that rising CO2 will not warm the planet excessively, we have a responsibility to stabilize CO2 levels.”

The opposite is equally true. For example, if a poor person in Africa can gain health, improved agriculture, and a living wage due to development that produces CO2 and we cannot definitely prove that rising CO2 levels will not warm the planet excessively, we have a moral obligation to allow that person the tools to develop their lives.

I love the idea of using the sacrifices of past generations to justify the idea of sacrifice for future generations. All for it, actually, but what sacrifices are “you” willing to make? Will you forgo air-conditioning, will you live in a high-rise with multiple families in your apartment? Will you give up air travel, and eco-tourism? Will you give up the ability to go where you want when you want? Will you only eat food that is grown in your local neighborhood? Will you give up seafood if you live in the interior? Will you give up heat? Will you give up imported clothes and coffee? Will you give up the internet? Will you give up your electronic time and labor saving devices? Will you give up a washing machine? What sacrifices are you willing to make?

So often, the response is “ummm” followed by embarrassed silence, when we figure out we want out cake and to eat it as well.

Sacrifices are often for “those others” and usually cost the poor in the developing world a whole hell of a lot more than those of us with WEIRD values.

The problem with the correlation between rising CO2 and warming is that the CO2 follows the warming, not the other way around. That’s why Al Gore makes sure to display the two graphs showing CO2 and temperature separated enough to not show which followed which. Can you prove to me that your posting on this website is not causing wildfires in the west? Since you started posting, numerous fires in the west have destroyed thousands of square miles of forest. My theory is that it will take at least ten years of you not posting to reverse this trend and you can’t prove it wrong, can you? Unless of course you quit posting for at least ten years.

i partially agree with you..it is not a science issue, and you do have the right to refuse to change the atmosphere… (although i hope you ll carry on breathing )

but well there is no practical way to stop using fossil fuel..so we will change the atmposphere..
and your point can be used against whatever can change anything
i refuse to change land use, new mining and so on..

And you know i don’t know for the planet, but it may be that more CO2 in atmosphere is good for our civilization and humanity!a change can be bad..but it can be good too…

Eventually , if half of the world refuse to change the atmosphere and the other half doens’t careat all..what will be?

Wow! Now it’s not a scientific issue but a moral issue! Talk about grasping at straws to prove a dead issue. The melting ice in the Artic is no greater now than it was in the early 1900′s; the polar bears are not going extent. The sea level has risen only a few inches at most. Let’s get real.

Uncertainty doesn’t force us to over-think issues like uncertainty about green house gas, does it? Muller’s work is hardly definitive for people who actually read science, and preferred and feigned ignorance of the 20th century solar Grand Maxima, for example, is not sufficient reason for destruction of any country’s energy path. If there was one you have not stated it.

The problem is, as Dr. Spencer makes clear, the preferred funding of work which promotes your “guiding mythology”.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is an evil point of view. It consigns and condemns literally 100s of millions of the poor of the world to IMMEDIATE increased suffering and death and long term deprivation without escape.

Hops, what you are saying is that AGW is a religion and even though there is no proof that human activity is causing these effects we have to follow the dictates of this religion because even the slightest possibility that it is correct will result in catastrophic consequences? By this same logic primitives made human sacrifices to ensure the Sun would continue to rise or the volcano would subside or whatever catastrophe was believed imminent. First, look at the actual expected consequences and you will see they are not as dire as you believe. Earth has been far warmer, far higher in CO2 and oceans far higher before and yet we are here. What would truly be catastrophic is for us to spend all of our resources trying to stop a climate change that is going to happen regardless of human activity and be left with too few resources to adapt to it.

I’m not saying AGW is a religion, but it is an issue of ethics. If one is religious, that may affect your view of obligations to others.

No proof? There is no such thing as proof, only evidence, and there is strong evidence that CO2 is raising the temperature. Here’s a quote from Rich Muller, a former skeptic, who analyzed the data:

“How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.”

And I have evidence that the big ball o’ fire rises in the east, dies in the west, and is reborn each day. There is no proof, just a strong correlation to my hype-o-thesis.

I also have a strong correlation of evidence that when the big ball o’ fire is in the blue stuff I can’t touch that the fire part of my day is warmer than the not fire part of my day when the sparkly diamonds are out.

Or, to paraphrase The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ proof!”

Seriously though, AGW may not be a religion, but it does take a certain amount of faith.

Of course, we have an ethical obligation to care for the planet and for those who come after us, yet we have the obligation to do so in a way that is logical and with limited unintended consequences. Case in point, how many people died of malaria because of the anti-DDT hoax “Silent Spring” that led to the banning of that substance for mosquito control? Did we have an ethical responsibility for all those who suffered as a result?

Hops, there is one huge flaw in the correlation between CO2 and warming and that is that rising CO2 levels have, at least in the last 400,000 years, followed the warming. The other problem is that even when CO2 levels were 10 times those of today in the distant past, the temperatures were little different from today. This is the overwhelming evidence that CO2 is not responsible for warming, but rather in natural cycles it appears to be the opposite.

Another scare from the AGW hoaxers I have heard is that heating will release even more greenhouse gases, especially methane from clathrates, and this will cause an unstoppable spiraling upward temperature. If this were true, then why didn’t this happen when temperatures were much higher in the past? The only conclusion Mr. Muller has pointed out is that warming has happened with no conclusion on why. Dr. Spencer and the majority here agree. Climate change is a natural occurrence or we would not exist on what would still be a hostile rock planet. All you have to support a belief that man is causing an unprecedented change in climate is a faith that an unproven theory with failed models predicting a continued upward trend. Your position is a religious one with no scientific evidence to support it.

You’re just another data falsifier. Ocean levels are rising slower this century, not faster. Check the satellite data posted at NASA. Predictions of high sea level rise is based on projections by guess what? Climate models.

Current and future CO2 levels are not a risk to humans of any age group. The only studies that have only shown negative effects show these effects occur at around 1200 ppm with any clarity or consistency. This is much higher than the CO2 level we see, which remains close to the millennial average.

What people who cherry-pick a few shocking facts in order to push their point don’t seem to always miss is that we don’t all care about their personal preferences; thus enviroclimatism seems to be fully based on egotism — and that magical scientific and/or moral source that has now rendered them superior to the rest of us.

Unfortunately, I am not able to stop, so I
can’t help, I need to stay warm, and drive
to the grocery store.

But, seriously, Global Warming
theory is flawed, the atmosphere keeps
the Earth warmer than the moon, but
greenhouse gases are what cools the
atmosphere, they don’t really warm it.
The error came about when somebody
read that the Earth would be colder
without an atmosphere and assumed that
meant the atmosphere had to be capable
of absorbing infra-red.
The truth is, any atmosphere would
be warmed by contact with the surface
warmed by the sun.

Water is the big player in the climate
of the Earth, it moderates the temperature
in many ways, and water vapor and CO2 are
the main gases that keep the atmosphere
from getting too warm.

It is not unusual for scientists to
have it backwards, Dr. Roy should be
able to see that the atmosphere would
be warmer without greenhouse gases,
and it is certain nobody can name
anything else besides greenhouse gases
that keep the atmosphere cooled.

I would suggest, Roy, that the culprits who have caused you the frustration, which IMHO is entirely justified, are the learned scientific societies. Just about all of these bodies, lead by the Royal Society, the American Physical Society and the World Meteorologic al Organization, have deserted science in favor of advocacy. These learned bodies have wholeheartedly endorsed CAGW, and have dug themselves so deep a hole, that it is difficult for them to stop digging. Hopefully one of these days, one of these learned bodies will face the music, and then , hopefully, the rest will follow.

And yet we are continually being told by “climate experts”, that “global warming” is happening more quickly than we expected!
Of course the excuse is that it just isn’t in the right place, i.e. in the deep ocean or the ocean surface or, as in this case, not in the Tropics.
But did the models predict that the temperature increases would be in those other places?
At the very least, it is possible to day that the models didn’t correctly forecast the global distribution of temperature increase correctly.
Even if the temperature increase is higher than expected in those regions, that is still a fail.
Is it possible to compare the model forecasts with observations for other regions, e.g. the arctic and antarctic?

I concur wholeheartedly with your observations. I believe the AGW climate scandal will go down as one of the greatest scientific frauds in history. The Piltdown hoax is nothing compared to this. What is sad, as you mentioned, is the loss of funding to other kinds of climate and weather research. Imagine lives saved if for example we could have predicted tornado occurance more accurately. Imagine money and lives saved if money wasted on windmills were spent on disaster preparation and mitigation.

“The Climate AGW scandal has given science a black eye.”
Science produces valid knowledge, and so can be exploited by people connected to political power. It’s simply another incidence of the potential for cronyism. In popular parlance, we speak of cronyism as “corporate cronyism” … and so are inclined to view this as sciences fault…but,in fact… the constant in all such-like cronyism is in what is possible through the manipulation of Law, and that requires government intrusion… voila… scientific-cronyism.
Hey.. what’s in a name?!

For some time now I have labeled all these government intrusions, also called public/private partnerships, as crony fascism–which more accurately describes the force being applied to private businesses by the government and the rewards being given to those who are connected.

As to your frustration, well it’s probably weak consolation, but at least you are out of jail and still able to speak your mind … given the proven inclination of mankind for dealing with unbelievers summarily, that is probably as good as it gets.

People like you and John Christy have set an example of high scientific and ethical standards throughout this debacle, and you will still be remembered when those currently still riding high will have long been forgotten.

If not for the fear of catastrophe, climate science in general wouldn’t be funded as well as it is now. So if sanity suddenly breaks out, research into natural climate change will get a much bigger slice of a much smaller pie.

Dr. Spencer writes: “[W]e scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication…”

The famous physicist Max Planck sadly remarked that a “scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

It will be interesting to see a few decades hence whether a proper accounting of natural climate change forcing leaves any residual whatsoever for an anthropogenic component.

Tim Free writes: “The Piltdown hoax is nothing compared to this.”

The Piltdown Man was created by melding a human skull with an ape jaw. The Piltdown Climate was created by melding inhomogeneous data (e.g., Mann et al.) The Piltdown Man was a hoax because the fossil was constructed surreptitiously. The Piltdown Climate is worse than a hoax because the perpetrators showcase their methodology as state-of-the art. It’s as if melding a human skull with an ape jaw were an openly accepted way to study human evolution.

Unfortunately, almost all of the new crop of climate researcher post-doc’s are being supported under contracts which support the party line. It’s the few of us old-school guys who will be the ones dying out and being replaced.

Those who resisted the idea of tectonics were resisting something that successfully explained a great number of observable phenomena using a single, rather neat, hypothesis. A hypothesis, incidentally, that could be confirmed (or falsified) by measurement an prediction.

Those who resist the AGW mainstream are resisting something that has spectacularly failed to explain any observation of the real world except, briefly and with a lot of ungainly “tweaking” of the maths, a short period of warming which has now been followed by a stasis of temperatures for a similar period.

A hypothesis, incidentally, which is incapable of being confirmed (OR falsified) by measurement, and which has consistently failed to achieve any meaningful prediction other than “retroactive” ones – which are a linguistic, as well as scientific, joke!

Hasn’t there been a long period of warming and cooling as clearly evidenced by glacial advances and retreats south from the “melting Arctic” (in the Northern Hemisphere) and among other things the Yosemite Vally in Californi?

Why don´t we draw the “Observation-line” 5 years further
as an “observation-line forecast”? Then it will be clear to the slowest in mind how false the CMIP5 graphs really are….
Five years into the future will be sufficient……

When one has a null hypothesis that has morphed into an immutable credo, it falls outside the province of science becoming unfalsifiable. No matter what the empirical data shows, or indeed whether we all wind up power impoverished and half starved in a forming ice age, anthropogenic induced climate change will always remain the tantric chant of the possessed.

Probably later than sooner, it all depends on if there are any scientific groups, heads of departments, etc. with integrity. There are other scenarios: Most scientists will be willing to come out with more papers that state that cooling is predictable using models, so the theory is correct as it stands, and we only need to wait for observations to catch up.

It would be nice to see a comprehensive galactic/solar/oceanic/climate/bio energy theory to supplant the greenhouse model and apparently we have not educated anyone who is capable of it, or they all have contracts, as Roy suggests; perhaps there is someone with a job at the patent office.

CAGW may have frightened the world into over-reacting about climate, carbon will have a “black eye” for years to come and billions has have been spent by governments dupped by a consensus of alarmists who did not apply basic principles scientific method (motor mouths over reving – brains disengaged!).

Tim is the cup half full or half empty?

Actually I think our cup is brimming over, because we also have the likes of the Roy Spencers, Anthony Watts, Bishop Hills and Steve McIntyres just to name a few of the dedicated Climate Realists …. hmmm I really like that term “CLIMATE REALISTS” YES. Driven by their genuine desire to find the truth and apply scinetific methods to question hy, the world is much better off and our understanding of climate is growing dramatically.

Eventually the CAGW flat earthers must capitulate, their only legasy will be a man in the street with empty pockets, more likely to question what the experts (X = unknown quantity and spert = drip under pressure!)say and a better understanding of our world from the few who did question.

I think the cup is half-full – because as you have mentioned scientists like Roy are fighting to reveal the truth. Brimming over? I think not. Many “scientists” in their desire to get grant money simply tack on some meaningless reference to climate warming or climate change. Of course the outcome is predetermined to satisfy the $$$ source.

Truth will prevail eventually, Roy. You just need to realise that the whole paradigm of radiative forcing and greenhouse effects simply cannot be applied to other planets and is thus not valid physics.

In contrast the new paradigm is based on non-radiative mechanisms which not only explain temperatures in all planetary atmospheres and surfaces, but also below the surface. Why, for example, is the core of our Moon so hot? How does the required energy get down into the atmosphere of Uranus to make it so hot.

None of this has anything to do with a day-to-balance energy balancing act.

You’ve only got 3W/m^2 reaching Uranus and that does not get beyond the very uppermost layers of its 20,000Km deep atmosphere, where temperatures near the centre are thousands of degrees. Why is it so? The explanation is in my 20 page paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” in the PROM menu at PSI.

Before you die out, promote the real truth, Roy. That’s all the advice I can give you.

You have to use the core of the Moon for evidence?? And you continue to misrepresent Uranus surface temperatures, which from what I can find, are not “hot” at all? Please, Doug…how many times do I have to ban you from your infinite supply of IP addresses for you to get the hint?

Unlike other gas giants, Uranus most likely boasts a rocky core rather than a gaseous one. Temperatures inside it may reach 8,540 F (4,727 C), which sounds warm but is cooler than other planets — Jupiter’s core may reach 43,000 F (24,000 C).

Just to let you know, Doug (to the best of my knowledge) is here in Australia and most Aussies are on dynamic IP addressing. Basically, everytime you reboot your modem in Australia you get a new IP address. If you keep banning Doug’s IP addresses, eventually you’ll inadvertently ban every Aussie!

What you describe has all the appearance of trans-generational government confiscation. A variant of the Max Planck quote above might read:

“government funded research does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it, often dependent on it and lacks any memory of a time without it.”
John K

The social inertia to retain parasites on the body politik will likely only result in the death of the carrier (country), but at least the poor and the ever fewer people who still attempt to work and provide useful products and services to others on a voluntary basis and haven’t thrown in the towel can console themselves that a few post docs have been richly rewarded and can pay back their student loans with government money.

Just for the record. I’m actually thankful for the useful work you do in helping to quantitatively measure temperature and other aspects of our climate. It just seems to me that much climate research could be funded by private money and the plethora of duplicitous research programs reduced to those with sufficient market support to continue. It seems from the many graphs you post and books/publications written their exists innumerable organizations spending extensive time and money modeling a climate system they quite obviously have little clue about.

The truth is private capital has never funded basic research, the stuff that comes before profitable ideas, and it never will. It has always been philanthropy and public money. It’s too easy to use some examples of bad science to bash something that is more generally driving our technically advanced society forward.

Climate models have a role to play in our society, hurricane prediction is a good thing, even climate prediction a few years to decades out would be a useful tool for many industries and societal planning so that ultimately the advances being made now do offer some benefits to us. We can argue about the ways these things are being used now though.

This is somewhat unrelated but I think is an interesting analogy. Virology. the field I have had connections to, went from a sleepy, backwater science to megabucks with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. No doubt we have learned a lot from all the extra money pumped in to virology but at the same time there’s been plenty of substandard work and there is also a feeling from scientistS who work on viruses other than HIV who believe their research has been squeezed and marginalized by the dominance of HIV. These are not too different to Roy’s complaints here.

Another example might be stem cell research which was effectively stifled in the US by political interference.

The truth is that any science that comes into close contact with wider political or societal issues is going to be buffeted and manipulated and used and abused in the process.

I see plenty of good climate science research (yes funded by tax dollars) just like I see plenty of good virology research and stem cell research. I think you have to keep that in mind even while identifying problems with the ongoing process.

“The truth is private capital has never funded basic research, the stuff that comes before profitable ideas, and it never will. It has always been philanthropy and public money.”

The fact remains all philanthropic and “public money” initially came from someone’s private capital. NASA obtained not only money originally obtained from private sources, but their technology came from private companies as well. Private companies provide research all the time. Who provided the R&D to invent the computer chip? Private entrepreneurs like Shockley and others invented the transistor. The list of private entrepreneurs and researchers from the Wright Brothers, Edison, Steve Jobs and today’s Burt Rutan and innumerable others provides ample testament to the productive capacity of private enterprise that carries an idiotically ungrateful nation forward. Private enterprise built the technology that we take for granted today. The aerospace industry in particular. As to virology, the historic achievements of private researchers from Jonas Salks, Alexander Fleming and all the unnamed researchers today would be countless. While today many Universities conduct medical research, no rational reason has been presented as to why private money cannot fund Universities and/or research. Especially since those Universities frequently depend on private contributions, grants, endowments etc., and often directly and or indirectly on taxes paid by private individuals and companies. The main factor that changes when private funding flows freely to projects would be the priority competing research projects might receive. Certainly projects likely to attract more voluntary capital would receive greater funding to the detriment of competing projects, but why would that be a bad thing? Why should financially popular projects not receive money? Why should governments lay up debt for unpopular projects few if any wish to research?

All that said I do understand that the NIH and other publicly funded Universities do conduct viral/medical research. They have made many achievements and I don’t begrudge their success. However, private research can and has provided funding in the past and will continue to do so. No one has provided any rational reason as to why research projects should be chosen by the dictates of government bureaucrats over the voluntary choices of companies and individuals in the market. Why for example, since you brought it up, should private research dollars be squeezed to support politically correct HIV research while others go unfunded? Did that choice result from the voluntary decisions of a free people or the dictates of arbitrary goons in high government positions who did nothing to earn the money?

As to stem cell research. Adult stem cell research can and has been funded by private research and has provided untold benefits. Embryonic stem cell research has provided no visible benefits at the expense of untold millions/billions of involuntarily confiscated private funds and unfortunately untold numbers of lost/murdered lives. Who benefited? Follow the money. In any case, certainly government at times plays a useful role in public health, especially in regards to communicable diseases, requiring safe sanitation standards (protecting lives and property) etc.. Nevertheless, no need has been demonstrated to enforce investment choices on private individuals.

Well, Dr. Spencer, if it is of any consolation to you, Mother Nature doesn’t share the same party affiliation as the next breed of climatologists. She will go right on proving them all wrong even after we are long gone.

I wonder how many of the new crop of climate researcher post-doc’s saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in ‘Science’ class and were led to believe it was science fact. Have they ever looked at it’s ‘data’ or questioned it?

Didn’t Lenin say something like ‘give me their minds for four years and I will own them for life’?

The vast bulk of the atmosphere is composed of N2 and O2, non-radiative non-GHGs. They are unable to dispose of sensible heat except through evaporative loss from the top of the atmosphere. Only GHGs (especially H20) can radiate energy to space. Hence, in their absence, the atmosphere would heat until it could “boil” away enough mass to counterbalance solar irradiation.

No Roy and Anthony It’s not an “old school” issue at all. The issue of planetary atmospheric, surface, crust, mantle and core temperatures throughout the universe can all be explained under the “new paradigm” which is based on the non-radiative process described in statements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as explained in my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” in the PROM menu on PSI. I challenge either of you to publish it and run a thread on which you allow me to debate the issue with anyone and everyone. It would be a top-rating thread I assure you.

In reply I quote BigWaveDave who had the last word on the WUWT thread which tried to debunk Dr Hans Jelbring’s 2003 paper about the gravity effect, but which completely overlooked the fact that a temperature gradient in the wire itself stops endless energy circulation.

“I have been earning a living as an engineer specializing in cutting edge technology for very large scale thermal energy transfer processes and power systems for close to 40 years. My credentials include BS, JD and PE, and I have four patents.

“As for my qualifications to engage in argument with PhD’s, I have many times been part of and have led teams with PhD team mates. I was also married to a PhD for 20 years.

“Because the import of the consequence of the radial temperature gradient created by pressurizing a spherical body of gas by gravity, from the inside only, is that it obviates the need for concern over GHG’s. And, because this is based on long established fundamental principles that were apparently forgotten or never learned by many PhD’s, it is not something that can be left as an acceptable disagreement.“

The linear plots would have been OK if all plots ended at the same time (2012). When the plots don’t end at the same time you have model data, for time periods that have not occured yet, effecting the over all slope of the linear regressions but that does not occure with the real data (because we don’t know the future yet). So it is sort of like comparing apples and oranges.

It is amazing how the models diverge from reality.
Something must anyway be right, because the small wiggles in the model average and the observations seems to be syncronised.
I wonder what the cause is for these small wiggles and wonder even more that the models have them too.

Every scientist using graphs knows, that “the small wiggles”
make a curve trustworthy…..because they “prove” that
calculations were carried out indeed. The wiggles are therefore most important part in science….

All the vested prestige is a large obstacle to admitting you have been wrong, the longer you look at natural vaiability making a mockery of your carefully calculated projections/predictions the harder you cling to the hope it will switch back and prove you right.
Plan B is a probably a slow and drawn out turnaround to avoid the public backlash you mention.
First signs of a mainstream downward reduction are starting to show though, along with an acceptance of a larger role for natural variability. So eventually some funding for research on that will appear, just don’t expect much of that to fall into the hands of sceptics.

In the second part of my review of your book, The Great Global Warming Blunder, I pointed out that your constant refrain that “For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change,” is patently false, and you (inadvertently) acknowledged as much. Would you mind being more specific, so that you aren’t beating a straw man?

To Barry:
Roy is right, natural cycles are unterrated in Warmistic literature. Two examples: The 61 year Jup-Sat Nicolas Scafetta cycle, which translates into PDO and AMO cycles on Earth, and secondly, 5 major climate drivers which govern the climate were excluded since 2006, in preparation of IPCC AR4: The missing 5 climate change drivers are extensively discussed
in http://www.knowledgeminer.eu/eoo_paper.html
For those 5 missing drivers, the CMIP5 models must necessarily and hopelessly go astray from reality observations.
What warmism is doing now is begging to buy time with their
30 years WMO minimum time demand, after seeing that their plots disintegrated since year 2000, since the end of global warming and the onset of the temp plateau…..
If you haven´t realized that, your mind is stuck behind in time…

You say, “Roy is right, natural cycles are unterrated in Warmistic literature.” But that isn’t really what Roy said, is it? In fact, he said, “For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change.” Can you see the difference?

And do you really wonder why almost all scientists (not even just climate scientists) don’t bother trying to take account of how the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn affect the Earth’s climate? I’ve been a critic of Roy’s modeling attempts, but for Pete’s sake, his stuff at least hasn’t been **insane**.

You’ll get the anticipated business as usual reply based on an argument from authority from the Minister, ‘thanks’ but no comment from the toxic Greens and nothing from NZ Radio, except possibly the one liner I once received sometime ago from M. Lush – “idiot.”

Their collective belief ensures that falsification of the C/AGW null hypothesis is forever impossible.

As I said in my earlier post, it would be interesting to see similar comparisons for the arctic and antarctic, if the model projection data exist for those regions.
I suspect that they may go the other way, i.e. observations higher than projected, at least in the arctic, but that would still represent a “fail”, in that the global distribution of temperature increase in the models is wrong, which would still indicate a problem with the models.
The problem might be that the regions covered by the model projections and the observations don’t coincide.

The hypothesis and models require that tropical topospheric heating occurs first and drives the rest of the system. It’s missing; if anything, there’s a slight “Cool Spot”. Probably due to the overwhelming negative feedback from H2O, which the models get backwards.

Roy, you do a great service to us all by pointing out the complete failure of politically driven climate science. One would wish that some of the funding wasted on this effort could come to the study of natural climate variation.

I’ve been telling pretty much anyone who will listen (and many who won’t) that the next couple of decades are going to be very interesting. Recently I’ve reduced that to the next decade. Between data like yours, the Livingston and Penn sunspot studies, and that 2450 year tree ring record in China ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/07/in-china-there-are-no-hockey-sticks/ ) that suggests 2006 was the peak heat, how can it not be interesting?

After that we may all be freezing and starving, which won’t be quite as interesting.

You can at least count on the apparent fact, backed by apparently by over 30 years of research collected in Roy’s graphs. Whatever happens to the climate over the course of the next century or so you can be almost certain the climate predictions made by those modelling it will be completely inaccurate.

Since research funding is being channeled to achieve a desired outcome to achieve a political goal, I wonder why no lawmaker of investigative journalist has not taken up the cause to expose this fraud. It is clear that this scheme is aimed at influencing public opinion (at least the low information persons). Paul Watson was spot on when he said “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”

Some journalists do pen fact based articles exposing climate deception. Human Events and alternatively some science publications and Internet blogs probably run many such articles. However, many let us just say less than objective publications learn to massage their message according to the dictates of those in position of governmental authority. Many academics and professionals who’s livelihood depends on a steady flow of fiat currency know the alarmist meme keeps them in the black financially and perhaps in other ways. The wealthiest people in the country no longer live in Silicon Valley or the productive industrial heartland. They seldom ever produce anything of value anymore. They frequently put on false airs of unearned superiority, collect government checks for products and services often unseen and undesired by most citizens (assuming they even exist) and maintain their positions through deception. They now often live in Washington D.C.

Roy,
Not so fast. This is tropical mid-troposphere data. When we speak of global warming, it is understood as global land and sea surface temperatures. The most comprehensive study is Berkeley Earth with 1.6 billion temperature data and it shows 0.9C warming in past 50 years. http://berkeleyearth.org/results-summary/

Granted your data represent global temperature, this is over 30 yrs. Can’t that be explained by natural variability like PDO and AMO? There can be a longer 100-yr warming trend that’s anthropogenic. After all, the 20th century has periods of warming and cooling but overall there’s clear warming trend, unprecedented in 7,000 yrs based on sea level rise.

Sorry. Berkeley Earth is just land temperature. IMO inconclusive since 90-95% of surface heat is in the ocean. But just the same isn’t Roy’s data also inconclusive? Maybe enough to debunk the models but to debunk AGW?

Gotta luv this guy Strangelove. He’s on a hiding of 73 to zip at the tropical troposphere, but oh, he hopes that AGW may be occuring elsewhere on Earth. Sorry, game over Dr Strangelove, because we’ve all stopped worrying and are now loving the models.

Yeah as far as I’m concerned 73 is meaningless whether they say warming or cooling. Models have never been reliable in the first place despite what IPCC claims. They only match observations by tweaking the adjustable parameters. You can match anything you want, ice age or inferno. It’s child’s play.

But the more sensible scientists know that AGW is not just models. It is also based on observations. To raise sea level by 17 cm in 100 yrs, now that requires a lot of heat. When was the last time we saw that? Not in past 7,000 yrs prior to 20th century. Huge natural variability suddenly appeared last century. And oh that 390 ppm CO2, the highest in 100,000 yrs had nothing to do with it. Purely coincidental.

Your statement “To raise sea level by 17 cm in 100 yrs, now that requires a lot of heat. When was the last time we saw that? Not in past 7,000 yrs prior to 20th century.” Is not correct when looking at the available evidence.

Please look at the linked graph from NASA research (which is a strong advocate for human caused global warming).

I enlarged the graph and did some rough estimates. It looks like the oceans rose around 16 meters from 7500 years ago to 5000 years ago. If you take 16 meters into 2500 years you get a yearly rise of 0.0064 meters. There are 100 cm in a meter so multiply this by 100 and you get 0.64 cm/year. In 100 years you get a sea level rise of 64 cm which would be a rate 3.76 times greater than 17 cm in 100 years. Obviously you did have a much greater sea level rise in the past 7000 years. Note this rate looks fairly uniform over the entire 2500 year period.

You may need to do a validity check of your current belief system and upgrade it with accurate information.

The “old paradigm” embedded in these climate models is smashed when you consider Venus. Each Venus 4-month-long day the surface temperature rises by about 5 degrees, and it cools by 5 degrees at night. Obviously the energy which increases the temperature in the day comes from the Sun. We have only about 20W/m^2 of direct solar radiation getting through the Venus atmosphere in the day, and yet the Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us we would need about 16,100W/m^2 of radiation to increase the temperature of the Venus surface when it is in the vicinity of 730K. Obviously radiation from the colder atmosphere cannot increase the temperature of the surface, for that would be an outright violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In any event, there is not enough radiative flux entering the atmosphere. So the energy cannot get there by radiation alone and in fact radiation can play only a very small role.

So that leaves only non-radiative processes, and clearly it gets narrowed down to diffusion and convection. The reasons why (and the process whereby) downward diffusion and convection (“heat creep”) can in fact increase the temperature are explained in my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures.”

Doesn’t take much radiation penetrating to the Venusian surface to maintain 730K when the surface is blanketed by the superbly insulating layer that is the 97 bar Venusian atmosphere. And the function of insulation can be simply explained by the concept of “back radiation”. If the 730K surface “sees” the adjacent atmosphere at 729K, heat loss by radiation is very slow and so on all the way up to the upper Venusian troposphere where an appreciable portion of radiation can be emitted directly to space. So the 730K surface is simply a function of the extremely dense atmosphere (and the 97% CO2 is unimportant, 1% would do just as well). It is instructive just how similar is the temperature structure of the Venusian atmosphere from the 1 bar altitude up compared to that of the earth.

With President Obama saying he has no patience for those who deny climate change and DOE Secretary Moniz saying he is unwilling to debate the undebatable, would you expect any better approach to studying climate change.

Strangelove :
Dr. Spencer does not deny that global warming has occurred nor that CO2 emissions are partly to blame.

He parts company with the so-called consensus over the issue of how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gas emissions. The alarmists have argued for a high sensitivity, which as the graph shows is increasing implausible. Dr. Spencer has argued for a relatively lower sensitivity, which seems much more in line with observations

I am afraid that the graph tells us very little about the accuracy of models in forecasting “global warming”.
They tell us about the accuracy of the models in forecasting warming of the tropics.
It is also true that the models have proven inaccurate as far as “global warming” is concerned, but the graph doesn’t demonstrate that.
It is possible that the over-estimation of warming is worse in the tropics than other regions and it is also possible that there has been under-estimation of warming in some regions, but that still makes the models wrong. It isn’t possible to average the errors and claim accuracy.
Concentrating on the tropics and not looking at the other regions is likely to encourage accusations of “cherry picking”.

Ray, you are absolutely right. If Roy is trying to use his graph to show that climate sensitivity (a globally averaged quantity) is lower than commonly assumed, this is, indeed, an egregious example of “cherrypicking”.

But why would it cause anyone heartburn to find out that the models are “wrong” in some respects? Almost every numerical modeling textbook includes a quotation from the statistician George Box. Here’s the paraphrase–”All models are wrong, but some are useful.” In other words, all models are oversimplified in some ways, so they can’t get everything right. But they can be good enough at SOME things to be useful. If you look at the IPCC Reports, you will find long discussions of what the standard climate models seem to be good at, and what they don’t seem to be good at. Contrary to what people like Roy would have you believe, the scientists involved have a very realistic vision of what models can and cannot do.

On the other hand, if you would like to see some examples that show how unsophisticated Roy is about numerical modeling (e.g., he makes up fake statistical techniques that will give him any answer he wants,) then see this page:

Ray, except that’s where the signature of an alleged positive water vapor feedback is supposed to manifest itself. An absence of a large warming trend in the Tropical Middle Troposphere indicates that the water vapor feedback is close to zero. Thus, accusations of cherry picking are based off of ignorance, and not science.

That’s quite a claim you’re making, Barry. The signature in every single model for a stronger positive water vapor feedback is a stronger negative lapse rate feedback. You would then have to say that all of the models would have to be neglecting some sort of factor that allows them to inaccurately model the changes in the middle Troposphere.

It’s also not just the Middle Troposphere in the Tropics, models also over predict the amount of warming in Sea Surface Temperatures. The CMIP3 models predict warming in the Pacific and Indian ocean, where none has been observed over the last 17 years.

Our very large company had a CAGW propagandist show up and give a presentation the other day. Our company was pressured by greenpeace through the media to support its cause. Now we are being indoctrinated with agenda 21, sustainability and CAGW propaganda. Most see it for what it is but the younger employees think they are listening to a god when these types show up….truly sad…

Keep up the good work Dr. Spencer,we are following and passing on the truth of what is going in.

How can I find out more about these models? Is the code public? Is the code documentation public? If they are taxpayer funded I would assume the answer is yes. Can anyone tell me where to begin?
Thanks in advance.

As I have said each month that goes by the AGW predictions on global temperature trends are further off, while I am getting closer,although slowly but then again my solar parameters have not been met yet,due to the current max. of solar cycle 24 temporarily keeping solar activity in the low/moderate range,rather very low.

OHC content also playing out very very slowly.

Again I wiLl go on record and say if the sun has the following parameters for the balance of this decade,those being a solar flux reading of sub 72, ap index 5 or lower 98+% of the time(WITH A FEW EXTREME SPIKES) and a solar wind speed of 350km/sec. or lower,the global temperature average wil be around -.8c lower then it is today, with the largest drops in the N.H.

I have a specific forecast, which gives specific reasons along with a time frame.

Time will tell.
I am very confident if the solar parameters I mentioned are met for the balance of this decade that the resultant temperature forecast I have projected by 2020,is going to be pretty darn close.

Reply

salvatore del prete says:

June 4, 2013 at 3:59 PM

As I have said each month that goes by the AGW predictions on global temperature trends are further off, while I am getting closer,although slowly but then again my solar parameters have not been met yet,due to the current max. of solar cycle 24 temporarily keeping solar activity in the low/moderate range,rather then very low.

OHC content also playing out very very slowly.

Again I will go on record and say if the sun has the following parameters for the balance of this decade,those being a solar flux reading of sub 72, ap index 5 or lower 98+% of the time(WITH A FEW EXTREME SPIKES) and a solar wind speed of 350km/sec. or lower,the global temperature average wil be around -.8c lower then it is today, with the largest drops in the N.H.

I have a specific forecast, which gives specific reasons along with a time frame.

Time will tell.
I am very confident if the solar parameters I mentioned are met for the balance of this decade that the resultant temperature forecast I have projected by 2020,is going to be pretty darn close.

Reply

salvatore del prete says:

June 4, 2013 at 4:41 PM

Since Oct. of 2005 the sun has been in a prolonged solar minimum, versus 100
+ years of strong to very strong activity.

Lag times have to be appreciated with the OHC part of the equation,along with the accumulation factor of sub-solar years having to be taken into account now going on year 8 , along with the current very weak maximum of solar cycle 24, all conspiring to hold the temperature trend higher then would otherwise be the case, but as this decade proceeds these factors will be lessening.

The max. of solar cycle 24 should be ending within a year from now , and I say watch what happens to the temp. trend, as direct but even more importantly secondary effects from a very quiet sun start to exert themselves upon the climate, which I have mentioned many many times.

Past history makes a very strong case for my argument.

LOOK AT THE TWO MOST RECENT SOLAR MINIMUMS AND THE TEMP. TRENDS IN THE N.H. WHICH IS GOING TO MUCH MORE AFFECTED THEN THE S.H.

Reply

salvatore del prete says:

June 4, 2013 at 4:42 PM

Since Oct. of 2005 the sun has been in a prolonged solar minimum, versus 100
+ years of strong to very strong activity.

Lag times have to be appreciated with the OHC part of the equation,along with the accumulation factor of sub-solar years having to be taken into account now going on year 8 , along with the current very weak maximum of solar cycle 24, all conspiring to hold the temperature trend higher then would otherwise be the case, but as this decade proceeds these factors will be lessening.

The max. of solar cycle 24 should be ending within a year from now , and I say watch what happens to the temp. trend, as direct but even more importantly secondary effects from a very quiet sun start to exert themselves upon the climate, which I have mentioned many many times.

Past history makes a very strong case for my argument. Time will tell.

LOOK AT THE TWO MOST RECENT SOLAR MINIMUMS AND THE TEMP. TRENDS IN THE N.H. WHICH IS GOING TO MUCH MORE AFFECTED THEN THE S.H.

Historical data are from XBTs, CTDs, moorings, and other sources. Additional displays of the upper OHCA are available in the Plots section.

Recent estimates are based primarily on Argo profiling CTD float data. Satellite altimeter data from Aviso are used to estimate errors

The chart with the above article shows OHC , has STOPPED increasing in recent years.

As far as the stratosphere, warming had taken place in association with the volcanic eruptions of the early 1990′s followed by some cooling since.

However, I have to clarify my position and say it DOES NOT MATTER if the stratophere is cooling or warming per say, what matters is this , is the cooling less in the higher latitudes in contrast to the lower latitudes (N.H. especially), and recent evidence is saying yes.

One of the cornerstones of the AGW theory, was that the AO (POLAR VORTEX– N.H. ESPECIALLY ) was to intensify. The EXACT OPPOSITE is happening.

Just look at the behavior of the polar vortex over the past 5 years or so and you will see that is the case.

Dave your AGW THEORY ,is BS, and I will be doing my part to show this is so, and what/why will lead the climate to change,and how it will change.

Dave time will tell, we will find out one way or the other,although I must say it is not looking very good for your side as each month keeps going by with no global warming.

AGW theory has failed all tests, so alarmists return to the ‘consensus’ hoax
National Academies of Science defines a scientific theory as

“a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.”
Dr Richard Feynman, Cornell Physicist in a lecture explained how theorys that failed the test of data or experiment are falsified (“wrong”) and must be discarded.

GLOBAL WARMING THEORY HAS FAILED

(1) Warming not ‘global’. It is shown in satellite data to be northern hemisphere only

(2) It is now not warming. Warming (global mean and northern hemisphere) stopped in the 1990s

(3) Models suggest atmosphere should warm 20% faster than surface but surface warming was 33% faster during the time satellites and surface observations used. This suggests GHG theory wrong, and surface temperature contaminated

(5) Those who create the temperature records have been shown in analysis and emails to take steps to eliminate inconvenient temperature trends like the Medieval Warm Period, the 1940s warm blip and cooling since 1998. Steps have included removal of the urban heat island adjustment and as Wigley suggested in a climategate email, introduce 0.15C of artificial cooling of global ocean temperatures near 1940.

(6) Forecast models have failed with temperature trends below even the assumed zero emission control scenarios

(7) Climate models all have a strong hot spot in the mid to high troposphere in the tropical regions. Weather balloons and satellite show no warming in this region the last 30 years.

(8) Ocean heat content was forecast to increase and was said to be the canary in the coal mine. It too has stalled according to NOAA PMEL. The warming was to be strongest in the tropics where the models were warming the atmosphere the most. No warming has been shown in the top 300 meters in the tropical Pacific back to the 1950s.

(9) Alarmists had predicted permanent El Nino but the last decade has featured 7 La Nina and just 3 El Nino years. This is related to the PDO and was predicted by those who look at natural factors.

(10) Alarmists had predicted much lower frequency of the negative modes of the AO and NAO due to warming. The trend has been the opposite with a record negative AO/NAO in 2009/10

(11) Alarmists predicted an increase in hurricane frequency and strength globally but the global activity had diminished after 2005 to a 30+ year low. The U.S. has gone seven consecutive years without a landfalling major hurricane, the longest stretch since the 1860s

(12) Alarmists have predicted a significant increase in heat records but despite heat last two summers, the 1930s to 1950s still greatly dominated the heat records. Even in Texas at the center of the 2011 heat wave, the long term (since 1895) trends in both temperature and precipitation are flat. And when stations with over 80 years of temperature data were considered, the number of heat records last July were not extraordinary relative to past hot summers.

(13) Extremes of rainfall and drought were predicted to increase but except during periods of strong El Nino and La Nina, no trends are seen

(14) Alarmists indicated winter would become warmer and short. The last 15 years has seen a decline in winter temperatures in all regions. In places winter have been the coldest and longest in decades and even centuries.

(15) Alarmists had indicated snow would become increasingly rare in middle latitudes especially in the big cities where warming would be greatest. All time snow records were set in virtually all the major cities and northern hemisphere snow coverage in winter has increased with 4 of the top 5 years since 2007/08. Also among the east coast high impact snowstorms tracked by NOAA (NESIS), 11 of the 46 have occurred since 2009.

(16) Alarmists had indicated a decline of Antarctic ice due to warming. The

It might help in future posts to address your questions to an identifiable individual. Let me attempt to address your points. You stated:

“So.. would you say that river pollution has nothing to do with humans; fish depletion has nothing to do with human activity, soil degradation has nothing to do with human activity?”

No. Can you identify anyone who made such a claim on this post? Or would you rather be considered delusional?

You further stated:

“Are you seriously suggesting that humans can spew tons and tons of toxic shit into the air and it won’t affect the climate, or if the climate is affected, it has nothing to do with human activity?”

This statement appears so far divorced from reality as to be simply bizarre. What toxic gasses? Only two human emitted greenhouse gasses get considered seriously when discussing climate change, CO2 and methane. Methane (CH4) while it can build up in the atmosphere eventually breaks down to CO2. Methane while flammable proves lighter than air and simply does not accumulate in amounts sufficient to be seriously dangerous except in rare instances. CO2 (unlike CO-carbon monoxide) has not been shown to be toxic to humans except in rare instances when the CO2 concentration becomes so high oxygen becomes displaced and suffocation results. This supposedly happened as a result of natural (not human produced) CO2 being released from a lake in Africa. All plant life and all animal life that consumes plant life (you and I included) require CO2 directly (plants) or indirectly (animals) to live. If you decide to become an iron and/or methane eating bacteria or a deep sea tube feeding on sulfur vented from deep sea volcanoes let me know. Perhaps you may believe you can exist without CO2 in that event. What exactly do you think “toxic” means? While too much of anything can kill you, the ability for any substance to do harm depends on the quantity in relation to other substances in the environment. What exactly do you imagine humans have done to the atmosphere to affect the climate?

You went on to ask:

“Men who get women pregnant, have nothing to do with contributing to conception?”

I glanced at your web link. Honestly, does this statement represent some feminist wish, or do you actually expect us to believe you encountered someone who said this? In any case, you may wish to get better acquainted with the planet you reside on you do not seem to be well in touch with the facts.

The questions were analogies. Sorry you did not understand the humour in them.

You agree that nobody questions that humans are to blame for fish depletion, river pollution, due to human activity; but then when it comes to air pollution, humans have absolutely nothing to do with it (or so say the scientists funded by, among others the Koch brothers, #26 on the list of worst polluters).

“This statement appears so far divorced from reality as to be simply bizarre. What toxic gasses?”

Director general of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization says “Air pollution is causing more deaths than HIV or malaria combined.” I guess that air pollution is not ‘toxic’?

LOL…. it sounds like you have never spoken to someone who is not a member of your culture. Perhaps you should ask a few questions to verify that your interpretations of what I have said are accurate? You have misinterpreted what I said.. either intentionally or unintentionally.

I did not mean that CO2 is toxic to inhale.. its consequences on the planet, raising temperatures to 6C plus, if allowed to continue.. will be toxic to humans though.

“What exactly do you think “toxic” means?”

The word toxic is an abstract word, and like all abstract words it has multiple meanings and interpretations, particularly between people from different cultures. Clearly the way in which I meant it, and how you interpreted it, were not the same.

“What exactly do you imagine humans have done to the atmosphere to affect the climate?”

Same thing they have done to the oceans, biodiversity, species, etc…. fucked it up!!!

“Men who get women pregnant, have nothing to do with contributing to conception?”

You truly get a lot of exercise leaping to conclusions. You invented the following:

“You agree that nobody questions that humans are to blame for fish depletion, river pollution, due to human activity; but then when it comes to air pollution, humans have absolutely nothing to do with it (or so say the scientists funded by, among others the Koch brothers, #26 on the list of worst polluters).”

When did Roy, myself or any sentient person ever claim humans have nothing to do with air pollution? If you read my post you’d know I referred to the GHG gasses discussed in this thread not particulate emissions. Was your misrepresentation intentional or unintentional?

You further complained:

“Director general of the U.N. Industrial Development Organization says “Air pollution is causing more deaths than HIV or malaria combined.” I guess that air pollution is not ‘toxic’?”

U.S. particulate emissions responsible for health problems deaths remain far lower than they’ve been even since the 1970′s. Like many others concerned about respiratory health air quality should be a concern. In many parts of the world they do pose a problem. The subject of the thread however concerned GHG’s which in and of themselves do not pose much risk. People can spew quite a great deal of green house gasses (CO2, CH4 etc.) and simultaneously less amounts of dangerous particulates VOC’s etc. For example, The Dominican Republic burns quite a lot of hydrocarbon fuels (oil, gas etc.) and their neighbor Haiti much less so. However, Haiti burns a great deal more bio-mass (would etc.). Haiti has depleted much of their forests to provide fuel and polluted the air with significant quantities of particulates. The Dominican Republic burns more fuel but less particulates for any given amount of energy.

You went on to assume:

“LOL…. it sounds like you have never spoken to someone who is not a member of your culture.”

Hmm! You clearly assume to know what culture I’m from. You should explain that to my Chinese/Indonesian wife and many of our friends and associates in Asia, America, Europe and Africa, they might get a great laugh. However, your cultural insularity seems all to clear.

You further claimed:

“Perhaps you should ask a few questions to verify that your interpretations of what I have said are accurate? You have misinterpreted what I said.. either intentionally or unintentionally.”

If I have misinterpreted what you said please clarify.

Unencumbered by facts you cried:

“I did not mean that CO2 is toxic to inhale.. its consequences on the planet, raising temperatures to 6C plus, if allowed to continue.. will be toxic to humans though.”

Your babble begs the question “if allowed to continue” how long? Objectively, temperatures have not increased anywhere near 6C in recorded history. Perhaps you mean when the sun becomes a red giant, or after some long imagined period of the earth’s orbital decay. In any case, as I mentioned in previous posts the geological record proves clearly the earth has been vastly warmer than the present period. Only a few thousands of years ago the polar ice caps didn’t exist. Significant climate change proves to be nothing new. In fact, the planet geologically proves colder than early history. The arctic region still maintains vast quantities of permafrost. Do you know what that is? Russia hasn’t been the world’s largest supplier of ivory without a reason.

You still haven’t answered the question as to what you think humans have done to the planet’s climate. You irrelevantly brought up biodiversity, species (I assume you mean extinction), but the issue of the thread involves energy accumulation, heat, temperature etc. of the climate. Again, what do you imagine people have done to the climate?

You stated:

“The word toxic is an abstract word, and like all abstract words it has multiple meanings and interpretations, particularly between people from different cultures. Clearly the way in which I meant it, and how you interpreted it, were not the same.”

Toxic is an anglo-saxon term. It refers to something that threatens life and/or health. Why do you pretend at cultural diversity? Why can’t you provide your own definition?

You went on to conclude:

“Its clear you don’t understand a humourous analogy…”

No. We understand the analogy between claims as to human caused climate change and men causing women to get pregnant, it just fails to prove that humorous.

Just a parting question. Other than panic, leap to conclusions and hysterically vent what exactly do you want to accomplish on this thread?

I have not seen any evidence to verify that I have been duped, and most certainly nothing close to ‘duped so thoroughly and successfully that I am lost irretrievably’; but if you provide any such evidence, I’d be happy to check it out (which it appears is far more than you are willing to do to check out evidence contradicting your opinions).

If I found some evidence that my working hypothesis conclusions about climate change were incorrect, I’d be more than happy to change those working hypothesis conclusions, and amend them to a new working hypothesis. There would be no pain whatsoever involved. I frequently update all my working hypothesis conclusions (I ain’t got any beliefs).

Glad you understood the remarkably funny rant…. not sure what you found incoherent, but would be happy to clarify, if you are more specific. As for ‘rage’…. well that’s a very subjective thing ‘rage’. I’d describe it as passion; but stick to ‘rage’ if you like….

So… you gonna have to do a bit better than that… if you want to update my working hypothesis on climate change…

I have always claimed that the computer simulations of climate beg the question. They hard code adding heat because of increases in CO2 so that is what comes out in their results. Their simulation results prove nothing and are just a waste of computation. Looking at the wide variation in results it seems obvious that they do not really know what they are doing. The models are at best sophisticated WAGS and apparently they are all wrong. There is no evidence in past climate data that CO2 has any effect on climate. Considering that all these simulations have been wrong, recent climate data also provides no evidence that CO2 effects climate. Face it, we live in a water world where CO2 is important to the existence of life but it has no significance in terms of weather and climate.

Interesting graph.
Can you provide the details of the “observations” (e.g. data source, error bars, density of observations both spatially and temporally etc..)
It would be very useful to those of us who would like to reproduce it.

If I take an insulated container and fill it with 100% dry air and add heat to it the air temperature will increase.The total heat conatined in the 100% dry air in the container is known as sensible heat. Now if, at the same time I am adding heat, I also add liquid water at a pre determined rate such that the temperature does not increase then I can produce an air-water vapour mixture holding much more heat energy than the 100% dry air yet the dry bulb temperature will be the same. The heat that I add goes into converting the liquid water that I add into vapour and is known as the heat of evaporation or latent heat. The total heat of an air-water vapour mixture is the sum of the latent heat and sensible heat. So just because there is no dry bulb temperature rise does not necessarily mean that the total heat in the air-water vapour mixture is not increasing. I am not disputing your research. I just want to know if it is a case where the sensible heat component is staying constant but the latent heat is rising because there is much more stored heat energy stored as water vapour in the air. Many point to an increase in latent heat as the cause of the extremely violent tornadoes and storms we have been witnessing of late. No I am no alarmist. I work in the oil industry and don’t want to believe in global warming. It just seems to me that when we talk about temperature we should talk about both the dry bulb and wet bulb temperatures. In general when we talk about climate we should talk about sensible heat, latent heat, partial pressures of water vapour, relative humidity, dry and wet bulb temperatures and enthalpy. The vertical axis of the graph is in degrees C. Specific enthalpy of the air-water vapour mixture would better prove your point I think. I cannot see the details of the graph you display so I do not know how if you have show enthalpy. If not you might consider defining data points like they are defined in a psychrometric chart. That will force the discussion into the technical aspects and away from all of the irrational emotion driving policy today. Just my humble opinion. Thanks

Roy
Some comments.
You have plotted TMT from UAH & RSS against models for 20N to 20S.

Exactly what is the model data? Surface Temps; temps at some altitude; temps averaged over the entire troposphere; some weighted average of the troposphere results? This is unclear and needs to be spelled out if there is to be any meaningful comparison.

Surely you recognize that the TMT channel is biased low due to the fact that around 1/4 of the signal for TMT originates in the Stratosphere which has been cooling significantly. Thus TMT is not an accurate measure of what has happened in the middle Troposphere. You most definitely should be aware of that since you and John Christy produced the first version of the TLT product many years ago in part to try and remove this cool bias from TMT. So a direct comparison between TMT and the models isn’t valid.

Alternatively you might apply the weighting function for the TMT channel to the temperature profile produced by each model in order to produce what the TMT channel would expect to see for each models output. That would be the a valid way of comparing them.

But just comparing TMT to unweighted model output isn’t valid.

Why didn’t you also include the TTT product from RSS that is based on the methods of Fu & Johansson 2005 which is an alternative approach to showing a mid tropospheric temperature series with much of the stratospherics cool bias removed? This is giving a trend of 0.128/decade vs the TMT product from RSS which gives 0.091/decade – a significant difference.

Why didn’t you include their results? They produce a TMT product that is reporting a trend of 0.124/decade without any compensation for stratospheric cooling. If the ratio between the RSS TMT and TTT products is any indicator, STAR/Nesdis with the Fu & Johansson algorithm applied might well give a trend something like 0.17 which would bring it up into the range of the model results

Surely also you recognize that many researchers don’t believe that the balloon data is terribly reliable, with upper atmosphere data particularly being biased cool due to equipment design issues.

Are the model results single runs or do they represent multiple runs for each model?

If you used some of the approaches I suggest then up to 2000 you might actually see reasonable agreement between the models and data.

There is divergence after 2000. Did you evaluate the models to see which ones reproduce the change in vertical distribution of heat buildup in the oceans that has been observed in the ARGO data in the last decade or so? These would be the models that one would wish to compare observations against to evaluate how well they are performing.

As to looking at Climate Sensitivity from this data, as I point out, when some approach is used to compensate for the cooling bias in the satellite data then model/observation agreement from 1975-2000 is likely to be fairly good.

And with the change in heating distribution in the oceans over the last decade any attempt to estimate CS from atmospheric temperatures during this period will significantly underestimate the value. One decades data is too short a time to attempt this anyway.

Even then, this approach at best can still only estimate Transient CS. Full Equilibrium Sensitivity can’t be found by looking at short term data.

So, if the RSS TTT is correct, the data has more than twice as steep a trend as is shown here. And, as Glenn points out (although I haven’t investigated, the STAR/Nesdis group gets this trend before even trying to correct the TMT channel for stratospheric contamination.

The summary of all this is that there are simply too large uncertainties in the data to say with confidence that the discrepancy is a failure of the models.

And, furthermore, as has been pointed out in the literature, the models and data agree quite well for amplification seen in response to fluctuations in temperature on monthly- to yearly-timescales. It is only when looking for amplification of the multidecadal trends does one run into problems. But the multidecadal trends are exactly where the data are least reliable because of artifacts. Finally, it is hard to understand how the physics that leads to this amplification on monthly- to yearly-timescales could fail to lead to the same amplification for the long-term trends.

This is why the U.S. Climate CHange Science Program report on this subject concluded that issues with the data are the most likely source of the discrepancy. [And, they have already been proven at least partly right since an error was found in the UAH data set that significantly changed the trend in the tropics, making it agree somewhat better with RSS and the models.]

When comparing measurements with models typically you would compare the samples against the model uncertainty vs time. Normally compare means something like feed this into a hypothesis test to see if the measurements are taken from a process similar to the model. All your results show is that models are not perfect, like everything sorry.

One of blue lines stays rather close to measured data. Unfortunately seven models use exactly the same shade of blue (154,204,255) so I can’t tell which it is. Not like it changes anything on the conclusion but I really wonder which model is it and what are its parameters.

I have watched the farce of AGW since the mid 90′s. Before that it was global cooling that would do us all in. There has never been a dearth of catastrophe nuts but now there is more than enough science to disprove them.

The only problem now is to get the “scientific” societies back to advocating science.

“In this case, the models and observations have been plotted so that their respective 1979-2012 trend lines all intersect in 1979, which we believe is the most meaningful way to simultaneously plot the models’ results for comparison to the observations.”

If you want to suggest that the models are wrong you ought to use the same baseling procedure that the modellers actually use to make the projections. The observed temperatures in 1979 were close to a local maximum, which is bound to accentuate any difference between the trends in the models and the observations. Biasing the comparison in this way rather detracts from your message IMHO.

Thanks for all the information and discussion on your website and blog.

I would also like to see a similar graphical comparison between predictions and actual measurements for other things where apples to apples comparisons can be made. Such as perhaps ocean temperatures in a certain region.

To Eric H and Norman
Please look at the graph you provided more carefully. The sea level rise from 20,000 to 7,000 yrs ago was due to melting of glaciers. The report specifically stated glacier melting ended around 7,000-6,000 yrs ago. The period I’m referring to is from 7,000 yrs ago to present. The ave. sea level rise is 4 cm per century. In the 20th century it suddenly rose to 17 cm, four times larger than the ave. in 7,000 yrs.

Now tell me this is caused by natural variability? Do a simple physics calculation. How much change in temperature do you need to get 17 cm thermal expansion of seawater? The answer is around 0.5C. Another incredible coincidence! My golly that’s almost the same increase in air surface temperature during same period (20th century). It is within the margin of error 0.6C plus or minus 0.1C.

Evidence that CO2 drives ocean temp. and ocean drives air/atmosphere temp.? Of course for the skeptics these are all just incredible coincidences. BTW do you realize to incease ocean temp. by 0.5C the amount of heat you need is enough to raise atmosphere temp. by 500C? Because the specific of the ocean is 1,000x greater than the atmosphere. Yet we are obsessed in measuring air temp. when it is irrelevant from a physics viewpoint of global warming.

@pauld
I just read Dr. Spencer’s book The Great Global Warming Blunder. He believes there’s strong negative cloud feedback that limits climate sensitivity to less than 1C for doubling of CO2. I disagree. Just look at the increase in CO2 and increase in temperature last century. Extrapolate that and you’ll get 2.3C. Since it’s not linear, it will be less than 2.3C maybe 2C. Incidentally 2C is also the most probable value of ECS based on recent study (Otto et al, 2013)

IMO the greatest global warming blunder is not the confusion on cloud forcing and feedback as Spencer claims (though that’s plausible). The greatest blunder is using air temperature to measure global warming. The atmosphere may warm or cool but it’s the ocean that holds 95% of earth’s heat. It’s the ocean stupid.

Fundamental problem with all the CS is very low arguments. All the Paleo data disagrees. If some hypothetical cloud mechanism that really restricts sensitivity, then we can’t explain the magnitude of the swings during the glacial cycle. Milankovitch cycles aren’t strong enough and without CO2 & Methane forcings other changes such as albedo change due to ice can’t happen. So if CS is 1, the glacial cycle simply can’t be as big as it is.

We can’t explain how the Earth has compensated for the lower output of the Sun in the geologic past.

Essentially a CS of 1 means all of Paleoclimate science is nonsense. And since the Paleoclimate record derives from a wide range of different methods and ages, it is a pretty robust indicator of what the past has been.

Whereas ‘CS is 1′ has much more of a ‘motivated reasoning’ feel to it. CS is 1 because we want to believe it is. Not because the evidence says so.

Or if climate sensitivity is high we can’t explain basic stability achieved through the dynamic processes of water vapor and clouds. The Earth’s energy balance from the forcing of the Sun is extremely dynamically maintained, yet on global average the surface temperature barely moves by more than a few tenths of a degree from month to month and year to year. This is hardly consistent with net positive feedback of 300% or more coming from the two most dynamic components of the whole atmosphere.

If you really think climate sensitivity is 3C or more, how about you explain why it doesn’t take 1072 W/m^2 of surface power gain to offset the 239 W/m^2 of incident solar power? 16.6/3.7*(240) = 1077 (nearly 100C!). Climate sensitivity of 3C requires a dimentionless gain of nearly 4.5, where as post albedo incident solar power is only ‘amplified’ by about 1.6 (390/240 = 1.625).

(1) Your claim that a high sensitivity is incompatible with what is observed in the climate system everyday is belied by the fact that climate models that have such high sensitivities don’t have any particular problems that I know of in reproducing what you think should be impossible to reproduce in the presence of high climate sensitivity. You can’t just make idle claims that high sensitivities are incompatible with how we see the climate behaving: You must demonstrate this.

(2) Your calculation of what you think a climate sensitivity of 3 C represents in terms of surface power gain is simply wrong. It is basically the same mistake that I have seen others like Monckton and Willis Eschenbach make when they use the net radiative and temperature effect of the greenhouse gases (commonly argued to be that a 100-150 W/m^2 forcing produces a 33 K temperature rise) to compute a climate sensitivity. The problem with the argument is that what is considered to be a forcing vs a feedback depends on context. By calling all of the greenhouse effect due to water vapor and clouds a forcing, you are basically assuming there to be no water vapor feedback, i.e., you are saying that one must explicitly put all of the water vapor into the atmosphere rather than that some of it goes into the atmosphere due to the rise in temperature when you add the non-condensable GHGs. This is a completely circular argument: Assuming the result you want to show is a good way of getting the result that you want.

“Your calculation of what you think a climate sensitivity of 3 C represents in terms of surface power gain is simply wrong.”

How do you figure? To effect and sustain +3C from 288K requires +16.6 W/m^2 of net power gain at the surface.

My main point is solar power is only amplified by about 1.6, which effectively means it takes about 1.6 W/m^2 of surface power gain to allow 1 W/m^2 at the TOA. This already includes the lion’s share of all the feedback in the system, including especially water vapor and clouds, as they are by far the two most dynamic components of the whole atmosphere.

You can’t arbitrarily separate the physical processes and feedbacks in the sytem that are acting to maintain the planet’s energy balance from the forcing of the Sun, from those that will act on additional ‘forcings’ or imbalances. The physical processes and feedbacks themselves (from water vapor and clouds) would have absolutely no way of disinguishing such an imbalance from any other imbalance imposed as a result of the regularly occurring dynamic chaos in the system.

RW: You are looking at the average gain over that whole 240 W/m^2. What we are interested in is the gain at the margin, i.e., the derivative evaluated at the point where our current climate is. Since over much of that rise from 0 to 240 W/m^2, the Earth would be completely frozen with essentially no liquid water / water vapor (or even gaseous CO2)…and hence very little feedback at all, it is not surprising that the marginal gain is a lot higher than that average gain over that broad range.

Yes, this is what is used to calculate so-called ‘zero-feedback’ (+1.1C = 6 W/m^2, and 6/3.7 = 1.6).

“What we are interested in is the gain at the margin, i.e., the derivative evaluated at the point where our current climate is.”

Yes, we are interested in the response of the system to incremental warming, but the 1.6 to 1 power densities energy balance is extremely dynamically maintained, which means the system is really never in equilibrium, yet something – some set of dynamic physical processes hold it very tightly at that approximate balance. Given water vapor and clouds are by far the two most dynamic components of the whole atmosphere, the most basic physical logic says it must be the combined net effect of the two that maintain the balance (i.e. resist change above and below the average rather than re-enforce change above and below the average).

The bottom line is by designating the 1.6 to 1 ratio, which is itself the net result of the lion’s share of all the physical processes and feedbacks in the system – including especially water vapor and clouds, as the ‘zero-feedback’ starting point, arbitrarily separates the physical processes and feedbacks that maintain the current energy balance from the forcing of the Sun from those that will act on additional ‘forcings’ or imbalances, for which there is no physical or logical basis.

You can see that sea level has risen and fallen by many meters in the past. Why is this so? Look at the period of time from -120,000 years to -100,000. Sea levels dropped over 60 meters, rose over 40 meters dropped 40 meters and then rose 18 meters. What casued all these changes? Do we know? We can graph what we think happened to the sea level (with probably lots of potential error in our assumptions) but can we explain it?

Norman
Sea level rise 100,000 yrs ago is irrelevant to the point I’m making we don’t know exactly what caused it. Look at the Holocene chart. That’s mostly due to thermal expansion of seawater. You cannot compare sea level rises in different periods because they may have different causes. I’m specifically referring to thermal expansion not melting of glaciers, which involves different physics equation.

The point is the ocean itself is a gigantic natural thermometer more accurate than ice core and tree ring proxy data, which are regional, even more accurate than thermometer reading of seawater because that only measures shallow depths. Thermal expansion represents ave. ocean temp. all the way down to ocean floor.

Norman
Look at the graph you provided for last 120,000 yrs. The fastest sea level rise is 140 m in 20,000 yrs or ave. of 0.7 m per century. The report said this is due to melting of glaciers. The 0.17 m sea level rise last century is due to thermal expansion of seawater. The heat needed to expand seawater by one cubic meter is 150x greater than heat to melt one cubic meter of ice.

Hence if we compare apples with apples, that 0.17 m rise last century is equivalent to 25.5 m rise from melting glaciers. That’s 36x faster than the fastest sea level rise in 120,000 yrs! The 20th century warming was unprecedented in 120,000 yrs! I’m beginning to sound like Al Gore except this is not science fiction

Dr. Strangelove:
“Hence if we compare apples with apples, that 0.17 m rise last century is equivalent to 25.5 m rise from melting glaciers. That’s 36x faster than the fastest sea level rise in 120,000 yrs! The 20th century warming was unprecedented in 120,000 yrs! I’m beginning to sound like Al Gore except this is not science fiction”

Gosh!

I should buy a diving mask, I don’t swim!

“Norman
Look at the graph you provided for last 120,000 yrs. The fastest sea level rise is 140 m in 20,000 yrs or ave. of 0.7 m per century. The report said this is due to melting of glaciers. The 0.17 m sea level rise last century is due to thermal expansion of seawater. The heat needed to expand seawater by one cubic meter is 150x greater than heat to melt one cubic meter of ice.”

So the last 120,000 years rise was all from melting glaciers, while the last 0.17m/century from the thermal expansion of seawater.
What should have changed in the Sun supplied heat?

Exactly my point. Sun and natural variability cannot explain that. But we can always close our eyes and pretend that CO2, the highest in 300,000 yrs, had nothing to do with it. Merely coincidence that CO2 and warming are both at highest levels in hundred thousand yrs.

“Sun and natural variability cannot explain that.”
Really?
On this very blog I read a scientist who said me that atmospheric convective loops are perpetual machines just to justify his belief in the isothermal atmosphere in absence of GHGs.
The same way, saying that we measured an increase of 0.17m in last century and believing that these measurements are reliable it’s laughable.

“But we can always close our eyes and pretend that CO2, the highest in 300,000 yrs, had nothing to do with it. Merely coincidence that CO2 and warming are both at highest levels in hundred thousand yrs.”

No we should start to study (and verify) the facts instead of play with models which run on very expensive super computers.

Lara Croft was an idealized chick in the fantasist mind of a software designer. Now she is true only in the virtual world of a computer memory. The day we’ll see a so fine shaped girl handling one automatic machinegun for any arm firing one shot without injuring herself shoulders, then we could say that she really exist. No matter if a beautiful actress impersonated her in a movie, the reality is all an another thing.
Till today, I didn’t see a little proof of the supposed CO2 effects on our climate, but not because I keep my eyes close, exactly the opposite. Its it’s because I don’t like people who make claims without any verifiable proof.

“On this very blog I read a scientist who said me that atmospheric convective loops are perpetual machines just to justify his belief in the isothermal atmosphere in absence of GHGs.”

If you are talking about me, you have misunderstood what I have said. I said that it represents a perpetual motion machine and hence that an isothermal atmosphere is the equilibrium state of the system even in the presence of gravity, a fact that has been verified by rigorous statistical mechanics calculations.

I have no strong opinion either way on whether the atmosphere would be isothermal in the absence of GHGs because such an atmosphere is still not in equilibrium.

Hi Joel,
yes I was talking about you; and maybe because of my bad English, I still evidently don’t understand what you mean with: “I said that it represents a perpetual motion machine and hence that an isothermal atmosphere is the equilibrium state of the system even in the presence of gravity, a fact that has been verified by rigorous statistical mechanics calculations.”

IMHO the fact that the atmosphere will be in equilibrium without GHGs is just an assumption, not a proven fact.
I still looking for someone who explain me when the molecules should stop to rise in that setup, where their KE is constant against the altitude.
I repeat (except that there is a physical law, which I don’t know), in gases (mass*speed^2)/2 is the KE, you know better than me, who I’m just an engineer. How the molecules of the outer layer can stay there without escaping to the outer space, since they receive the energy from the below?
And, even in my own modest opinion, this is a key point for the models: if they attributed the whole lapse rate to the GHGs, they surely overestimated the GHGs effect.

“IMHO the fact that the atmosphere will be in equilibrium without GHGs is just an assumption, not a proven fact.”

I didn’t say it would be in equilibrium. In fact, I said, “such an atmosphere is still not in equilibrium”. As I said, I am agnostic as to whether an atmosphere without GHGs would be isothermal or not.

“And, even in my own modest opinion, this is a key point for the models: if they attributed the whole lapse rate to the GHGs, they surely overestimated the GHGs effect.”

You are quite confused on this whole issue. I don’t even know what you mean about attributing the whole lapse rate to the GHGs. The lapse rate occurs because the atmosphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above. It would even be larger if not for the fact that lapse rates larger than the (appropriate, saturated or dry) adiabatic lapse rate are unstable to convection and convection drives the lapse rate back down to the adiabatic lapse rate.

However, this has nothing to do with estimating the GHGs effect. We know what the temperature of the Earth’s surface would be in the absence of GHGs, independent of the thermal structure of the atmosphere, because of the constraint of radiative balance.

“You are quite confused on this whole issue. I don’t even know what you mean about attributing the whole lapse rate to the GHGs. The lapse rate occurs because the atmosphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above.”

Maybe I misunderstood you again, but iMHO you contradict yourself here.
If you wrote that “The lapse rate occurs because the atmosphere is strongly heated from below and cooled from above”, you implicitly states that without GHGs the planet shouldn’t have any lapse rate, because the GHGs theory states that the GHGs are the only drain of energy from the above.
And since I’m not the one who talked about isothermal atmosphere (but the climatologists), I assume that also who wrote the climate models think the same way, ignoring the gravitational field, which in my opinion should “cools” the higher strata by converting KE into PE. Well if who wrote the models thinks that the atmosphere without GHGs is isothermal, he probably attributed the whole lapse rate to them giving them an high radiative efficiency which could be not.

Well, yeah, the fact that the atmosphere can cool by radiation does seem to be relevant to the lapse rate … But, an atmosphere with no GHGs is a strange (and probably unphysical) construct, so I simply don’t know what to expect in terms of the lapse rate in that case.

At any rate, I don’t see how the issue of whether the atmosphere is isothermal or has a lapse rate comes into the coding of the models. You seem to think that the models are coded in some way that attributes the lapse rate to them…but I don’t think they are. Given the thermal structure of the atmosphere as observed, one can determine the radiative effects of the GHGs.

Also, as has been explained in other places by Tim Folkerts and others, you have to be really careful about the KE and PE arguments…It turns out that things are pretty subtle in that regard, which is why some people have been led to conclude INCORRECTLY that the state of THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM in a gravitational field is one with a lapse rate when in fact it can be rigorously shown that it is isothermal (and that having a lapse rate in thermal equilibrium leads to a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

Hi Joel,
“when in fact it can be rigorously shown that it is isothermal (and that having a lapse rate in thermal equilibrium leads to a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics).”
Could you point out where I can find that rigorous demonstration?
I would like to spend a little of my time on it.

DR. Strangelove
“Which is more credible? The 0.17 m sea level rise measured by scientists or your belief that no it isn’t so? Nevermind, your answer is different from the rest of us.”

It’s evident that there is a “slightly” difference in the concept of measurements between scientist and engineers.

If they used your credibility concept of measurements, men never landed on the moon.

“Sea level and atmospheric CO2 aren’t based on models. They are based on actual measurements.”

Yes, such measurement as the Grace satellites does for the ice caps melting. Or the ground temperature measurement network which depending on the “correction” for this or that computed (modeled?) phenomenon such as irrigation or UHI tell, that us that the temperature has risen, fallen of stayed steady.

“Perhaps you don’t believe in the atmospheric greenhouse effect, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it has a climate sensitivity of 1.1C without feedback. Facts that both warmers and skeptics agree on.”

I’m not looking for any belief, I’m looking just for science. That some years ago, some old good professors told me that it should everything else than a belief
I still agree with them.

Dr. Strangelove (or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Data),

You strangely claimed:

“Sea level and atmospheric CO2 aren’t based on models. They are based on actual measurements.”

That statement proves empirically false on a moments research. The University of Colorado measures sea level. By their own admission, they do not provide raw sea surface data but alter it based on various assumptions. For example, they make what they call a “Global Isostatic Adjustment” to the raw numbers to account for what they claim to be the increasing volume of the ocean/sea basin. They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume. Their reported data shows a bouncy but steady annual sea surface increase of as you might have guessed approximately 3.2mm per year. Virtually all (if not all) their measured sea surface proves to be a mere mental construct. Hardly a measurement!

Have a great day Dr. Strangelove. “Til, We Meet Again.”

P.S. – Sorry I just can’t resist the puns. Hey, maybe you can adopt a variant to the U.S. military slogan in the movie – Accuracy is our profession.

My statement:
“Virtually all (if not all) their measured sea surface proves to be a mere mental construct.
Should have read:
Virtually all (if not all) their measured sea surface increase proves to be a mere mental construct.”

“They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume.”

The correct adjustment amount should be .3mm per year. The adjustment increases modeled sea volume ~10% not 100%. My apology to the University of Colorado. Although, the fact that they adjust the data at all (hopefully not in other ways as well) should create pause. Again, I should have heeded my own admonition and examined the data more closely.

“They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume.”

The correct adjustment amount should be .3mm per year. The adjustment increases modeled sea surface level ~10% not 100%. My apology to the University of Colorado. Although, the fact that they adjust the data at all (hopefully not in other ways as well) should create pause. Again, I should have heeded my own admonition and examined the data more closely.

One point for you to consider on this thread is regardless if the concept that all the warming is going in the ocean the models are not very good. They should be programmed to handle all the variables. If energy is entering the oceans keeping the surface warming less intense, then the models should reflect this. Roy is pointing out how badly the models represent the observed warming trend.

The error bars are much greater than the current observed sea level rise. Just because a researcher runs a line through the middle of the error bars does not mean that we really know what the actual sea level rise is. It could be much more jagged and variable. I think the information is currently too sketchy to form any real scientific view.

You have every reason under the sky to be frustrated and upset. Not only the high flying climate gurus are blatantly ignoring Reality and oftentimes are literaly even unaware of what the actual data show, but Government bureaucracy is explicitly trying to silence scientists, who dare to point out that models are failing. I was recentlly banned from doing any climate research, simply because my findings were contradicting the climate policy of my Agency…

We now have a full explanation as to why models are failing, and what is driving global temperature variations on decadal to centennial time scales. All models decouple radiative transfer from convective heat exchange, which produces the unphysical (artificial) dependence of temperature on CO2. In reality, changes in down-welling IR radiation are completely offset on a global scale by corresponding changes in convective cooling. Changes of atmospheric emissivity CANNOT produce changes in surface temperature in reality. This effect is only present in radiative transfer models that are solved independent of convection as in the case of climate models.

What drives global temperature variations on decadal to centennial time scale is the solar magnetic activity through cloud cover, and especially low-level clouds. if we are to understand recent climate change we need to focus on this solar-cloud connection and understand the mechanisms involved …

Please stop spreading your falsehoods about the treatment of convection. You are the one who treated convection incorrectly in your “theory of climate” paper: You put convection into the simple shell model in a way that, BY YOUR OWN DESCRIPTION, drove the lapse rate to zero. That is completely unphysical and it is well-known that a necessary condition for the greenhouse effect to exist is that the atmosphere be cooling at the effective radiating level than it is at the surface; you would have known that had you bothered to read any basic text in climate science, such as Ray Pierrehumbert’s text.

The fact that it has now been a year and a half since you released you paper and you have not addressed any of the substantive points raised against it, such as the one I am talking about, shows a lack of serious engagement that is very disappointing. Making elementary mistakes in a paper that claims to be revolutionary is not unforgivable, but persisting in spreading nonsense…when you have had people explain to you exactly why what you are saying is nonsense…is not forgivable.

(1) Do you now deny that your way of implementing convection drove the two shells to be at the same temperature (even though you claimed in the paper that this is what happened)?

(2) Do you deny that the actual atmosphere has a lapse rate so that the effective radiating level is at a lower temperature than the surface of the Earth?

Man up and admit your mistakes…At what point does refusing to admit mistakes become outright lying?

[By the way, my original PhD work was in statistical mechanics (and some superconductivity too). I worked in optics at Kodak because that was what most of the computational problems there involved; I have never actually taken an optics course, per se, in my life. Hence, I have worked in a variety of different fields.]

Interesting to note that the prediction that I made January 10, 2012 concerning your reply to various criticisms of your paper still holds true a year and a half later: “My prediction is that when said reply does come out, it will not address the substantive critiques on the original work. It will probably focus on sidelights that are not really important (or even well-defined) like what the average temperature of the moon is. By doing so, it will avoid the obvious…” (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-climate-theory-may-confuse-cause-and-effect/#comment-860185)

Dr Strangelove:
You say “But we can always close our eyes and pretend that CO2, the highest in 300,000 yrs, had nothing to do with it. Merely coincidence that CO2 and warming are both at highest levels in hundred thousand yrs.“

My age has gone up ever since birth and has been the highest ever in the last 10 years. Is it purely coincidence that T has done something similar or that CO2 has followed my age.? Such arguments are a tad weak and just as strong as “what else can be causing the warming but man-made CO2?”

I could suggest the usual answer to imponderables as being “ God” or that there are a few gnomes at the bottom of my backyard just pumping heat in and out of a black hole to the centre of the earth – true. I will catch them!

You say “I’m beginning to sound like Al Gore..” I’d agree especially when T was at a minimum as CO2 hit its peaks in the last half million years.

The CO2 sensitivity in the 1910 to 1945 period is vastly different to the CS of 1976 to 1998. Further does CO2 go to sleep for a decade at time, go on strike or on “go slow,” got fever or perhaps takes decadal leave?

As to your comments on clouds being immaterial perhaps you should follow up on a recent paper “What Are Climate Models Missing?” Bjorn Stevens1, Sandrine Bony2

Stevens has written on this before and supports Dr Spencer’s conclusions about clouds.

I’m not suggesting that the ocean heat doesn’t play a part but for now it is questioned by Pielke’s arguments that such heat migration has not been detected on the way down.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” ..Hamlet. Seems apt to me.

“Is it purely coincidence that T has done something similar or that CO2 has followed my age.? Such arguments are a tad weak and just as strong as “what else can be causing the warming but man-made CO2?”

The probability that CO2 will follow your age is almost 100% because it is certain your age will increase with time and near certainty that CO2 will increase because we are pumping 30 billion tons of it every year. The probability that both CO2 and T are at highest levels in 100,000 yrs happening by chance is 1/1,000 or 99.9% probability not by chance. So your age argument is very weak and CO2 argument stronger.

“T was at a minimum as CO2 hit its peaks in the last half million years.”

Obviously false. CO2 peak now, T not minimum since the ice age was colder than today. Or you don’t believe the ice age occurred?

“does CO2 go to sleep for a decade at time, go on strike or on “go slow,” got fever or perhaps takes decadal leave?”

Thermal inertia of ocean. Part of natural variability. Takes time for heat transfer to atmosphere.

“As to your comments on clouds being immaterial”

Not immaterial but cannot explain why sea level rise fastest in 120,000 yrs. Whatever is driving clouds must not be operating for 120,000 yrs. Or it’s not the clouds.

“such heat migration has not been detected on the way down.”

17 cm of thermal expansion of seawater is heat in the ocean. When, where, how much heat will migrate is for climate scientists to find out. The fact is the ocean already warmed by a large amount. That’s global warming, probably unprecedented in thousands of yrs.

I feel you are somewhat loose with the facts as you are with your subjective probabilities. Both of us can play that subjective game.

What references do you have that show we have never been at this T for the last 100K years. Greenland was over 2deg C higher about 8K years ago. The idea that one can insulate a large area the size of Greenland from the rest of the world by that T difference would indeed raise my eyebrows.

What was used to achieve that – special force fields?

Most of my reading suggests that T was equal or exceeded in the last 12000 years – such as Mediaeval, Roman, Egyption and Minoan warm periods. Coincidently even this article I am reading says so:

There go your probabilities – blown sky high as no one has suggested CO2 was the culprit then nor is there a clear explanation. Are we to say it did not happen to resolve the problem – hockey stick like!

Of course you have not quite told us how it is that CO2 goes on long vacations or takes naps or goes on strike and then has periods of working extra hard. I would have to be on magic mushrooms to believe that and simply throw away all physics and chemistry texts.

Thus far you have suggested that a number of climatologists don’t really know as much as you do on the subject. Now I am going to explore that most climatologists are equally encumbered. Trenberth started his search for the missing heat some 7 years ago – you know “a travesty” that they could not explain the lack of T increase. Same with Hansen and virtually every climatologist.

Do you really believe that if the answer was SO SIMPLE THEY WOULD ALL HAVE MISSED IT? Given they had a proclivity to finding some excuse I suggest we can treat them as independently “ignorant” of your discovery. If I ascribe a paltry probability of only 0.1 that each would discover your hypothesis (magic mushrooms cos that is the first place they would look for missing heat) it would mean that there is 1 chance in millions very quickly that the host of searchers would miss it.

There is more chance that my backyard gnomes are shoveling this heat into a black hole than all climatologists not discovering it.

In truth you have not done the sums. The volumetric coefficient of expansion of water is 207 (10^-6/C deg). This is quite consistent with your 17cm rise in a century and the surface T increase. I would have expected a much higher rise if the oceans were well mixed and had received the same T increase uniformly.

Contrary to your suggestion that there can be no other explanation plausible that cloud changes have indeed been dominant. It would not take much of a change in clouds to alter the T of earth and ocean heat content one way or the other. What other possible, plausible explanation is there?? (tongue in cheek!!).

Ned, An objective analysis shows that approximately half of the 0.74C temperature rise in the 20th century was do to the effect of sunspot associated solar magnetic field on low altitude clouds. Most, if not all, of the rest is due to natural ocean oscillations with the main participant being the PDO. The analysis that demonstrates this is documented at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html

Dr. Strange – Lean & Rind apparently lacked insight as to the difference between energy and the derivative of energy which is power. Sunspot numbers are proportionate (at least fairly closely) to power (That is the hypothesis that I started out with). Temperature change is a measure of energy change (through the effective thermal capacitance). The appropriate metric for sunspot influence is the time-integral of sunspot numbers. The high correlation that occurs using the time-integral of sunspot numbers, as I did, is astounding.

I’m still not clear if you’re disputing climate change or critiquing the accuracy of climate models.

If it’s the latter, I suggest that rather than only criticizing, build a better one.

If it’s the former, the reason most scientists and rational people for that matter agree that climate change is happening at a faster rate than can be accounted for by natural phenomenon is due to a simple energy balance.

The energy stored in oil, coal, and natural gas took millions and millions of years in generation. We humans, over the past 100 years have converted all of that stored energy in to heat, and the byproducts of that conversion. This simple fact cannot be ignored and should inspire us to improve our ability to model this incredibly complex system and find ways to power humanity without the extremely costly, dangerous, and dirty activity called fossil fuel consumption.

“I’m still not clear if you’re disputing climate change or critiquing the accuracy of climate models.”

Interesting, I’m not clear who you’ve addressed this post to but I’ll take a stab at it. Roy maybe? In any case, the failure of the climate models to reflect reality proves self evident. Personally, I prefer empirical data, and fact to models. As to disputing “climate change” why do you have a problem with debate and factual analysis?

You went on to blurt:

“The energy stored in oil, coal, and natural gas took millions and millions of years in generation. We humans, over the past 100 years have converted all of that stored energy in to heat, and the byproducts of that conversion. This simple fact cannot be ignored and should inspire us to improve our ability to model this incredibly complex system and find ways to power humanity without the extremely costly, dangerous, and dirty activity called fossil fuel consumption.”

You made quite a list of untruthful non sequiturs. Allow me to attempt to address a few.

Do you have factual, empirical evidence that the energy stored in oil, coal and natural gas took millions and millions of years to generate? Did you observe the process? Do you know of anyone who has? For the record, any honest scientist will instruct you that fossilization requires rapid burial by water and earth mineral before other organisms, animal or bacterial, break down the organism. It cannot happen over millions of years. The government paid for the mass slaughter of millions and millions of buffalo throughout the nineteenth century. Have any of them fossilized? The soft tissue “flesh” has long since been consumed by animals or broken down by bacteria. The bones have been reduced to powder or used by phosphate companies. BTW are you aware that human and animal remains have been found at the bottom of coals seams, as well as human artifacts. Fossilization, remains a process few if any have ever witnessed in nature.

BTW if we humans have consumed all the energy stored in the earth’s hydrocarbons, why does our government make it illegal to drill for said hydrocarbons throughout most of the country when according to you they no longer exist? Why do energy companies continue extracting what isn’t their from the earth? Apparently, what you call a simple fact proves to merely delusion.

As to the “fossil fuel” claim, I’ve dealt with this in other posts. Coal (lignite, bituminous and anthracite) apparently derived from organic living organisms since many fossil remains of living organisms can be found in coal. The deeper the depth of the coal seam the darker and higher energy content will be the coal found their. However, you have a problem with oil and natural gas. While near surface oil does lack the carbon 13 isotope consistent with living organisms, oil found deeper in the earth does not suggesting an abiotic (hence non-fossil) origin. Methane CH4 comprises at least 80% of natural gas and has volcanic origin. Methane can form from iron oxide, calcite and water deep within the earth (100 miles below the surface) under high heat and pressure (50 giga-pascals)and this has been demonstrated experimentally (Sandia Labs). Astro-physicist Thomas Gold first introduced this mechanism years ago. The earth vents methane all over the earth’s surface including the deep ocean where methane hydrates form. Natural gas and most of the alkane group chemicals apparently have inorganic origin, and do not originate from “fossils.” If you have factual evidence (not models please) proving otherwise please present them.

Forget the models. I don’t believe in models. My hypothesis is just based on observations: CO2, sea level, air temperature.

“Irrigation may be contributing some to the sea level rise”

If it is, it’s only 13%, not enough to replace thermal expansion. And I doubt it because ground water for irrigation must be from shallow wells, which is part of water cycle. Deep ground water is too mineralized, its salinity is higher than seawater or sometimes too acidic. Not good for irrigation.

“Deep ocean warming is very very small so the thermal expansion is confined to the top 700 meters or so of ocean.”

It doesn’t matter if thermal expansion is from deep ocean or shallow. We can measure the total effect in sea level. Temperature measurement is no good because limited to 2,000 m depth and/or sparse area coverage.

“it might not be that bad afterall.”

I hope so but 69 cm is still 4x higher than last century.

“The error bars are much greater than the current observed sea level rise”

It’s not the error bars but the trend line that’s important. The slope of the trend line tells you the rate of change in sea level over time. The error bars are statistically determined so the probability of high and low ends are equal.

You just made the same error I commented on previously regarding measurements, so I will repeat my previous post below.

You strangely claimed:

“Sea level and atmospheric CO2 aren’t based on models. They are based on actual measurements.”

That statement proves empirically false on a moments research. The University of Colorado measures sea level. By their own admission, they do not provide raw sea surface data but alter it based on various assumptions. For example, they make what they call a “Global Isostatic Adjustment” to the raw numbers to account for what they claim to be the increasing volume of the ocean/sea basin. They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume. Their reported data shows a bouncy but steady annual sea surface increase of as you might have guessed approximately 3.2mm per year. Virtually all (if not all) their measured sea surface increase proves to be a mere mental construct. Hardly a measurement!

Have a great day Dr. Strangelove. “Til, We Meet Again.”

P.S. – Sorry I just can’t resist the puns. Hey, maybe you can adopt a variant to the U.S. military slogan in the movie – Accuracy is our profession.
You should examine all data before relying on it.

“They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume.”

The correct adjustment amount should be .3mm per year. The adjustment increases modeled sea volume ~10% not 100%. My apology to the University of Colorado. Although, the fact that they adjust the data at all (hopefully not in other ways as well) should create pause. Again, I should have heeded my own admonition and examined the data more closely.

“They annually add approximately 3mm to the sea surface level to account for (model) this assumed increased sea volume.”

The correct adjustment amount should be .3mm per year. The adjustment increases modeled sea surface level ~10% not 100%. My apology to the University of Colorado. Although, the fact that they adjust the data at all (hopefully not in other ways as well) should create pause. Again, I should have heeded my own admonition and examined the data more closely.

Allow me another point of clarification regarding my post above. Petroleum found deep within the earth apparently doesn’t lack the carbon 13 isotope, if I remember correctly,
that plant life will not use.

I am not sure you can use a trend line with large error bars to reach a certain conclusion. If you look at temperature data you get a nice average temperature that goes up slowly over the warmer months (or down during winter). You have a large range inbetween of record high and low temps. You cannot tell from the average line (trend line) what the temperature will do for a month (the rapid ups and downs).

Here is an example of Omaha Nebraska in April. The temperature trend line goes up gradualy from 60F to 70F but when you look at the actual temperatures, they fluctuate all over the place. With an 0.8 meter error bar how are we to know that the sea level was not rising an falling in jagged fashion during these thousands of years and there is not unpresedented sea level rise going on at this time?http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/omaha-ne/68102/month/349291?monyr=4/01/2013#

I am not involved in climate politics. But there seems to be a problem in the climate science community and consumers, discussing personal views instead of discussing science arguments. The geometries of the solar tides are given to the climate community and have been put to the trash. Along with the juxtaposition of climate models here the solar tide model is not part of the graph.

At the same time, you present graphs derived primarily from conjectured temperature, power and other values (apparently not measurements) from un-observed past and future periods. You did provide UAH global satellite temperature data for the past ~30+ years or so, but couldn’t resist speculating about future solar tides. Scientific knowledge always has and always will comprise the facts and laws of nature not speculation.

While I do not have the physical science education you claim, I do know that science has been and always will be a method. If science no longer exists or advances, that only means no one remains willing to perform the methodology. While many in the supposed “scientific community” claim many academic titles and insist upon the verity of often contradictory theories the acid test of experimentation frequently lags. Academics rely more and more on computer simulation and modeling to reduce costs and aid in design work. The hard won gains of experimental knowledge suffers. The U.S. prides itself on many aircraft designs conjured from some CAD or engineering software. Has any one noticed that the most recent western jet fighter designs hail back to the 1980′s and we seem only capable of drafting sub-sonic drones. Current academics run around like primitive witch doctors wagging institutional degree papers like a cosmic proof of infallibility while achievement falters.

A kind of academic professional student dance/method has replaced the hard gains of experimentation. This kind of methodical pretense, where one goes through the motions of societal academic expectations, writes unending papers and carries on unending research may occupy time but until tested will accomplish little else.

There nearly always is a method in madness. It’s what drives men mad, being methodical.
G. K. Chesterton

My name is John, but thank you for the compliment. Please know I’m not sure what you meant in the first sentence, but I would agree that empirical observation would be required by someone to scientifically validate an event. To make claims about times Nd events no one has witnessed would be conjecture.

BTW, I read much of the information provided on your links and do not wish to dimiss alternative climate theories out of hand. Further, It might prove quite entertaining a few centuries from now should your theories appear valid and planets like Jupiter, Pluto and others seem to cause visible effects on tides and/or climate. Unfortunately, we’ll likely all be deceased before enough data is acquired to convince true believers one way or another. In the meantime, how does this theory affect the lives of most people? Probably it will have little or no impact. Will you change any plans because you believe the climate might cool a little before warming in 2100 AD? Buy a heavier over coat perhaps? Do you really think you can speak with any precision as to how the climate will act in any given year? What kind of error margin do you give yourself? Please let us know. Thanks.

science is not a belief system, it is an area of knowledge in the own mind and consciousness. Scientific knowledge is the result of recognizing coherence. The process of recognizing needs the ability to recognise truth. Truth cannot be shown and not purchased. But this philosophical gymnastic covers the subject again.
I have found a scientific key to solve the tides of terrestrial global climate frequencies, and it is evident that it can calculate the climate from 3000 B.C. to 2013 C.E. from known astronomical synodic functions. Because there is no reason, why the planets will change their paths, the knowledge can be used to compute the global climate until 3000 C.E. with a resolution of month. And because the paths of the planets are public knowledge, each one who is able can make use of this method. There is no theory required.
Science is to argue what IS. The try to show fails is not a scientific method; it is a political method in a political war. It generates no knowledge. It is the reason why science is killed.

Thank you for your response. You make many problematic statements both in terms of epistemology and basic logic. Before I can address them all I must first focus on one statement in particular, because unless we address it no rational communication can be possible. You claimed “Truth cannot be shown and not purchased.” The first part of the statement self refutes. You claim that “Truth cannot be shown” all the while showing me your response on this blog which you apparently assert as true. Do you see the problem with your statement? You capitalize the “T” as if to emphasize the verity and import of your claim, but in fact you’ve undermined it. By your own words, if in fact the “Truth cannot be shown” then your entire post, including that claim must be untrue and/or false. Why? If your blog post IS true then by sending it to me you have shown me the Truth, but you claimed the “Truth cannot be shown.” You contradict yourself and your statement self refutes. You apparently suffer from cognitive dissonance.

BTW, you should know that by sending me this e-mail you unwittingly conducted an experiment. You wrote:

“The try to show fails is not a scientific method; it is a political method in a political war. It generates no knowledge.”

By sending me this post and as a result showing your statements “failed” or proved false. You proved that Truth can be shown. Which generates knowledge to anyone willing to accept observation and facts. Please let me know if you acknowledge the incoherence of your statement and care to revise it. If not then no further communication between us will be profitable, since by your own words you can never be “shown the Truth.”

Dr. Spencer,
Do you know when the UAH – Lower Troposphere Global Temperature Report (map) for May 2013 will be published at http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/ ?
We got the “preprint” at WUWT, but no publication.

A friendly suggestion: When displaying modeled vs. observed data, please specify the emissions scenarios that were considered in the underlying modeling analysis. That would provide much more compelling support (or perhaps not) for the “epic fail” claim.

As I have said each month that goes by the AGW predictions on global temperature trends are further off, while I am getting closer,although slowly but then again my solar parameters have not been met yet,due to the current max. of solar cycle 24 temporarily keeping solar activity in the low/moderate range,rather then very low.

OHC content also playing out very very slowly.

Again I will go on record and say if the sun has the following parameters for the balance of this decade,those being a solar flux reading of sub 72, ap index 5 or lower 98+% of the time(WITH A FEW EXTREME SPIKES) and a solar wind speed of 350km/sec. or lower,the global temperature average wil be around -.8c lower then it is today, with the largest drops in the N.H.

I have a specific forecast, which gives specific reasons along with a time frame.

Time will tell.
I am very confident if the solar parameters I mentioned are met for the balance of this decade that the resultant temperature forecast I have projected by 2020,is going to be pretty darn close.

AGW theory has failed all tests, so alarmists return to the ‘consensus’ hoax
National Academies of Science defines a scientific theory as

“a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.”
Dr Richard Feynman, Cornell Physicist in a lecture explained how theorys that failed the test of data or experiment are falsified (“wrong”) and must be discarded.

GLOBAL WARMING THEORY HAS FAILED

(1) Warming not ‘global’. It is shown in satellite data to be northern hemisphere only

(2) It is now not warming. Warming (global mean and northern hemisphere) stopped in the 1990s

(3) Models suggest atmosphere should warm 20% faster than surface but surface warming was 33% faster during the time satellites and surface observations used. This suggests GHG theory wrong, and surface temperature contaminated

(5) Those who create the temperature records have been shown in analysis and emails to take steps to eliminate inconvenient temperature trends like the Medieval Warm Period, the 1940s warm blip and cooling since 1998. Steps have included removal of the urban heat island adjustment and as Wigley suggested in a climategate email, introduce 0.15C of artificial cooling of global ocean temperatures near 1940.

(6) Forecast models have failed with temperature trends below even the assumed zero emission control scenarios

(7) Climate models all have a strong hot spot in the mid to high troposphere in the tropical regions. Weather balloons and satellite show no warming in this region the last 30 years.

(8) Ocean heat content was forecast to increase and was said to be the canary in the coal mine. It too has stalled according to NOAA PMEL. The warming was to be strongest in the tropics where the models were warming the atmosphere the most. No warming has been shown in the top 300 meters in the tropical Pacific back to the 1950s.

(9) Alarmists had predicted permanent El Nino but the last decade has featured 7 La Nina and just 3 El Nino years. This is related to the PDO and was predicted by those who look at natural factors.

(10) Alarmists had predicted much lower frequency of the negative modes of the AO and NAO due to warming. The trend has been the opposite with a record negative AO/NAO in 2009/10

(11) Alarmists predicted an increase in hurricane frequency and strength globally but the global activity had diminished after 2005 to a 30+ year low. The U.S. has gone seven consecutive years without a landfalling major hurricane, the longest stretch since the 1860s

(12) Alarmists have predicted a significant increase in heat records but despite heat last two summers, the 1930s to 1950s still greatly dominated the heat records. Even in Texas at the center of the 2011 heat wave, the long term (since 1895) trends in both temperature and precipitation are flat. And when stations with over 80 years of temperature data were considered, the number of heat records last July were not extraordinary relative to past hot summers.

(13) Extremes of rainfall and drought were predicted to increase but except during periods of strong El Nino and La Nina, no trends are seen

(14) Alarmists indicated winter would become warmer and short. The last 15 years has seen a decline in winter temperatures in all regions. In places winter have been the coldest and longest in decades and even centuries.

(15) Alarmists had indicated snow would become increasingly rare in middle latitudes especially in the big cities where warming would be greatest. All time snow records were set in virtually all the major cities and northern hemisphere snow coverage in winter has increased with 4 of the top 5 years since 2007/08. Also among the east coast high impact snowstorms tracked by NOAA (NESIS), 11 of t

MY THEORY IS 1000X BETTER THEN THE AGW THEORY WHEN IT COMES TO WHAT MAY OR MAY NOT CAUSE THE CLIMATE TO CHANGE.

TIME WILL TELL. I GIVE SPECIFICS AND SAY IF THIS ,THIS AND THIS HAPPENS YOU GET THIS.

PAST HISTORY LENDS SUPPORT TO MY THOUHGTS.

I can’t find one time when an extended period of low solar activity(10+ years)/low ap/aa index corresponded to an increase in the global temperatures of the earth.

There is evidence based on c14/beryliium concentrations in the atmosphere that the Younger Dryas cold period 10,800bc-9600bc approx. mainly N.H.event might have been caused by very weak prolonged solar conditions.

4. more volcanic activity especially in high lat. more so2 surface cooling/ stratospheric warming. contributes to a more meridional atm. circulation. due tovery few but extreme spikes of solar activity in otherwise very quiet conditions.

5. more cosmic rays, more clo

6.OHC lessening due to weaker visible light emissins from the sun

EARTH CHANGES

north magetic pole moving south. Will promote cosmic ray effects in producing more low clouds for cosmic ray HIGHEST concentrations will be in lower latitudes where more moisture is available as the N. magnetic pole shifts southward.

A shifting N. MAGNETIC POLE, is indicative of a weakening earth magnetic filed which just serves to compound all the solar effects associated with prolonged weak solar conditions.

That is the essence of my theory and I put it up against the AGW THEORY BS, anytime., anyday of the week.

We will see who is most correct,before this decade is out. i fully expect very quiet solar conditions for the balance of this decade so we will know one way or the other.

All the above based on those very low solar parametrs mentioned in first post of this series of post.

Agree or not with me, I have specifics and again I say if this ,this or this happens with the sun,(lesser extent earth magnetic field) you get this,this and this on the earth or effecting the earth , which will give you this result for the climate.

” We have only about 20W/m^2 of direct solar radiation getting through the Venus atmosphere in the day, and yet the Stefan-Boltzmann Law tells us we would need about 16,100W/m^2 of radiation to increase the temperature of the Venus surface when it is in the vicinity of 730K. Obviously radiation from the colder atmosphere cannot increase the temperature of the surface, for that would be an outright violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

The 2nd Law only says *net* heat flow is from hotter
to colder.

A photon emitter does not know the temperatures of objects that it sends its photons to. A photon absorber does not know the temperatures of sources of photons that it receives.

(2) It is now not warming. Warming (global mean and northern hemisphere) stopped in the 1990s

With 5-year smoothing, the stagnation started with 2001. 1998 was a century-class narrow spike linked to a century-class El Nino. I see cherrypicking and exaggeration, which weakens one’s case regardless of which side one is on.

However, I do see CO2-caused warming as being about 40% as great as claimed by louder advocates of its existence.

The issues raised are very basic stuff. Just because you don’t understand the subject doesn’t mean it is wrong. After this, I will not answer such questions anymore.

Global isostatic adjustment. Of course they have to adjust for change in volume of ocean basin. If they don’t, the measurement would be wrong because this is a geologic process and not a change in volume of seawater.

Error bar. The trend line is the most probable outcome. Any deviation from the trend line is improbable. The greater the deviation, the more improbable it is.

HYPOTHESIS: Most of the heat goes to the ocean and sea level is a reliable measure of global warming (or cooling)

PROOF
Recent sea level rise at 3.3 mm/yr. Compute how much heat is needed to cause that thermal expansion? Answer: 5.24 watts per sq. m. OMG! That’s very close to the observed earth’s radiation imbalance of 5.5 W/m^2 from CERES and GERB2 satellite measurements (Dewitte, 2008). This means 95%of radiation imbalance heat the ocean and 5% goes to land, ice sheets and atmosphere.

DISCUSSION
If the ocean is heating but the atmosphere is not or even cooling, is there global warming? Since we are currently measuring air temperature, the answer is no. IMO this is the greatest blunder and cause of confusion and disagreement between warmers and skeptics. We are measuring 100% of the cause (radiation imbalance) but less than 5% of the effect (air temp.). As long as they are moving in the same direction, no problem. But once they diverge due to natural variability, problem arises.

PROOF
The fastest sea level rise occurred started from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) at 130 m over 20,000 yrs or 0.65 m per century. Almost all of it (125 m) due to melting of glaciers. In contrast, 0.17 m last century is mostly from thermal expansion. Since you need 150x more thermal energy to expand seawater by 1 cubic meter than to melt 1 cubic meter of ice, 0.17 m of thermal expansion equals 25 m of melting glaciers!

“Wait a second. NOAA released a report last year that concluded sea level rise from 2005 – 2012 was between 1.2 and 1.6 mm/year. The 1.2 mm/year estimate included 1.0 +/- 0.2 mm/year of mass contribution using the same GRACE data.

The total sea level rise from 2005 – 2011/2012 is somewhere between 0.2 mm/year and 3.5 mm/year.

Of course, no climate scientist would *ever* be so duplicitous as to draw any conclusions from such a short data record. We are constantly scolded that 15 or 17 or 20 or even 30 years is not sufficient to draw conclusions from a temperature data set. Right?”

I totally agree.
And I repeat myself:
It’s evident that there is a “slightly” difference in the concept of measurements between scientist and engineers.

Yes engineers are generally, not always but generally, quite incompetent when it comes to discovering how natural phenomenon work. They can follow simple rules to build bridges and fix cars, but as soon as it comes to unknowns and uncertainty of natural phenomenon then tend to come apart. That’s why we have scientists for that.

Sea level rise may be accelerating or may be just continuing to rise linearly. It’s hard to say at this time given the uncertainty in the measurements.

Trend lines are used to see a trend in noisy data (like stocks). They go up and down all the time and just looking at short term data you can’t tell what the long term action of the stock is.

Dr. Strangelove is still wrong on his analysis. The experts in the field only give about half of the seal level rise to thermal expansion so when he calculates he could only use 0.085 meters in the 100 year period as caused by thermal expansion.

If the Medieval warming was actually global or the little ice age, sea levels may have rose or dropped considerably during these events. The error of measurement is 0.8 meters for this time period and he is holding on to his incorrect and easily disproved understanding of trend lines.

Trend lines are required in noisy data. It data is not variable you don’t need a trend line, just connect the dots and you can see which direction its going.

I will do more research, I am not sure how he is calcualting the energy needed to expand the sea level. It depends on the volume he is using for his calculations. If you take the whole volume of ocean to expand 0.17 meters that may indeed take a lot of energy to accomplish. If you only need to take the top few meters, that is a lot less overall energy.

Thought Question: What would be the global equilibrium temperature if clouds could not form (everything else being the same)? Or what would the temp be if thick heavy clouds covered the Earth continuously? I think cloud cover variations may be the other possible factor that explains warming and cooling conditions. It could really help to explain the noisy data from year to year.

Hi Norman, hi Dan.
Yes, I agree with both of you, even if I don’t know much of atmospheric dynamics.
Norman, my point was that if Dr.Strangelove was convinced about his (at least) singular interpretation of the error bars, then I would like to know if he use that concept to design some human life-critical devices, in that case I would like to know for which company he works to avoid to use those devices and suggest to all the people I care of to do the same.
Of course, when I wrote “It’s evident that there is a “slightly” difference in the concept of measurements between scientist and engineers.” I was sarcastic. I really hope indeed that most scientists never rely their research on systems like the Grace satellites one.

I like looking at your math. You show even a tiny amount of differnce in cloud cover or cloud height can easily explain current levels of Global warming.

I did not know that a change in average cloud altitude could lead to the measured Global warming. That was a bit of new information for me. I was aware even small amounts of change in albedo could easily explain either global warming or cooling.

I think the climate models need to do more with clouds. Maybe they would get better results. I can understand your approach better than Volker Doormann’s solar tide explanation. One thing for Volker to consider is that correlation may not result in causation. You may be able to find formulas that match warming or cooling phases based upon planetary harmonics but that may not be the cause. Linking mechanisms are required. Cloud cover is a real and linking mechanism that can explain periods of cooling and warming without regard to CO2.

Even if the CO2 hypothesis for warming is correct, the experts state CO2 would be responsible for around 10% of the 33C warming. That would be 3.3 C for all the CO2. At current levels CO2 is doing about all it can to send radiation back to the planet (logrithmic scale), most IR is already absorbed at the CO2 wavelengths. If most is absorbed and leads to around 3 C warming effect, how could increasing the amount do much more?

Normam,
“One thing for Volker to consider is that correlation may not result in causation.”
I agree with some reserves. Respect to the CO2/GW correlation, in Volker’s correlation we are sure that the global warming can’t be the cause of the solar tidal correlation. So if in the long run the correlation continues, he could be right.

By the way, let’s me compliment with him for his great C.V.
I live very close to an Italian AFB which was the Italian home of the F104 squadron till the 80s; and I well remember those missiles-like-jets flying above our heads during the hot summer nights, when we used to keep our windows open.

Hi this is somewhat of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use
WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML.
I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding experience so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Unless I’ve misunderstood, climate models are based on land surface temps. The satellite (lower trop) records are more strongly affected by el Nino/la Nina events, and are therefore more prone to variability dominating the signal. Where models are compared with land surface temps, the obs fall inside the envelope of runs, albeit closer to the bottom of the spread.

Could you comment on this, Roy? Could the disagreement be or partly be a result of the greater sensitivity in the satellite record to interannual factors that have tended to bring cooler temps in the last half decade or so (ie, the most recent ENSO activity has been 2 strong el Ninos, which would drag the satellite-derived temp trends downwards)?

The RSS trend does not achieve statistical significance (trend greater than uncertainty) for 23 years (1989 – 2013), for UAH, it’s 20 (1993 – 2013). The full records show warming overall, but is it too premature to conclude that models are flasified when the discrepancy is only 15 years old, a period in which ENSO may make its influence felt more keenly for the stellite records than for the model-based surface temps?

“Of course, no climate scientist would *ever* be so duplicitous as to draw any conclusions from such a short data record. We are constantly scolded that 15 or 17 or 20 or even 30 years is not sufficient to draw conclusions from a temperature data set. Right?”

It pays to read the full paper if you have access, which is about comparing different measurement systems and trying to account for discrepancies.

Yes.
It’s the very same error that Dr. Spencer & Dr. Christy did, believing that doing some data computation one could remove unknown superimposed signals from the wanted one.
Integration works well when you do always the same mesurement in the same place and you know that the measurement errors are absolutely random.
I can understand the tides, but how do they dealt with sea superficial waves and winds induced tides?
And has John K stated before, what about the (arbitrary???) basins corrections?

In Italy we say:
“If my mother had the wheels then she was a bicycle.”
Meaning that one can say everything if he/she doesn’t have to justify what he said.

Roy: I have been trying to point out (here and elsewhere) that adding some extra running average filters in addition/replacement to the one you already display may well provide valuable insight into future behavior.

A great example for the range of Natural cycles of sea level change during this ice age can be observed in southern Florida at the Windley Key Fossil Reef State Park. The presence of Pleistocene fossil reefs from about 125 thousand years ago that are today exposed in an onshore stone quarry provide evidence (after considering other geologic variables like there has not been uplift) that sea level was about 6m or 20′ higher than it is today. I think alarmists have made the global warming of the last century seem abnormal and attributed it to humans by using bad assumptions about Earth’s sensitivity to CO2. Earth’s climate is dynamic and we are within the known boundaries for cycles of sea level change within this ice age. The correlation between warming and CO2 increase does not prove causation. Thank you Roy for illustrating the breakdown of this assumption over the last decade and for championing the funding of multiple working hypotheses for climate change.

Lean & Rind apparently lacked insight as to the difference between energy and the derivative of energy which is power. Sunspot numbers are proportionate (at least fairly closely) to power (That is the hypothesis that I started out with).

Temperature change is a measure of energy change (through the effective thermal capacitance). The appropriate metric for sunspot influence on energy is the time-integral of sunspot numbers. The equation results from an application of the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy).

The high correlation that occurs using the time-integral of sunspot numbers, as I did, is astounding.

Thanks TonyB, and can you help me with the math? As i understand it based on my calculations, the difference in heat absorption between .025 and .04% co2 is minimal under the atmospheric conditions with water vapor as the overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas. I thought the models use feedbacks linking co2 to water vapor or some other mechanism to create significant warming and this is where the correlation came in. My back of the envelope math was to take a theoretical vacuum with a black body floor and heated by a light bulb. Then add 85% N (inert) 14.975% h2o vapor then add .025 co2 and calculate the temperature. Then increase co2 to .04 and calculate the change. My simple attempt at physics led me to believe co2 isn’t directly able to explain much warming. Admittedly Im no expert and for example struggled to estimate the relationship between the partially overlapping absorption bandwidths of large amounts of water vapor and trace co2 and wasn’t confident I did this correctly, and it remains unclear to me how exactly the simple physics relate to the complex real world climate of a dynamic, layered atmosphere where water vapor can take different forms such as clouds that can either warm or cool the earth. As you can see the proof you describe in physics eludes me!

I sincerely thank you for the site link, and I certainly understand more about the physics after reading it. However my concerns remain that earths temp is not as sensitive to co2 change as modeled. I struggle to see how his explanation with pretend co2 and estimated absorption band shapes and uncertainty in how overlapping bands of different gases interact can be made reliable in the real models, and this does not even consider feedbacks like cloud cover that exist in nature. At the end of the day I think there is enough wiggle room in enough variables that you can make a model say what you want by adjusting sensitivities and then matching it with trends from ice cores or satellite data (during the warming phase of the 80s and 90s) to say co2 is driving the system. Thus the test of any current model Is how it projects into the future, and the existing models are failing this test. The concern is that we are selling bad science and making policy and tax laws on these models and they are not valid. The idea in my original post for multiple working hypotheses is because I think the models do a very poor job representing the sun. Solar variability is much more complex than just the flux of irradiance and there are feedbacks to clouds and atmospheric particle charges that are ignored in all ipcc models. Combine this with empirical data for events like the maunder minimum or even the common occurrence of solar periodicities in geologic proxies like annual varves and tree rings, and I become very suspicious that the dramatic increase in solar activity since 1900 (as estimated by sunspots) has potentially contributed to recent global warming more than models consider. Fortunately, the sun has provided a natural test and returned to a more typical moderate sunspot count, and this provides a fantastic natural experiment because co2 keeps climbing. Odd the global warming stopped in the satellite data about the same time the solar activity reduced (of course correlation is different than causation). It just seems this would be a good thing to study, and there are many other aspects of climate research that are not getting funding. Students are being thought the debate is over, and co2 from people is definetly warming the earth. What will these kids think of science if this is reversed later, and is this even how science works? I guess I don’t think there are absolutes in climate science and I prefer a more humble outlook that considers a breadth of possibilities. I have a cool documentation of my evolution of opinion on this issue locked in the papers I published. I started my phd in geology all in on man made co2 causing climate change that could be catastrophic but then started finding what appeared to be solar cycles in varves and tree rings. I investigated the sun and realized it was a climate driver, tried to publish and was in my opinion irrationally rejected by a reviewer that is a us government researcher. I learned quickly the politics of science, and I can tell you they are not productive.

One final thought, when are you guys going to be able to accurately predict rain so I don’t get drilled by a lightening storm in a jeep with out a top on what was forecast to be a clear day? Haha jk it’s a complex system there is always error.

There are many comments here and I haven’t been able to read them all, so apologies if my questions have been previously answered. I don’t quite understand what this graph means and I hope someone can help me out.

1) Is it appropriate to compare the model datasets in this way?

When I look at this graph it appears that most of the models have never agreed with the observed temperature. It seems strange that anyone would publish a study that is so off. I would assume that each model gets the climate temperature correct at least once for the time frame when they were published as it seems unlikely anyone would publish otherwise. So why don’t we see this? Why does it seem like the models never get the temperature right?

The graph says trend line intercept 0 = 1979 for all. I read that to mean that each model data set had a linear best-fit line drawn and all the best-fit lines were set to intersect at 0 for year 1979. Is that appropriate?

If you force the linear trend-line intercept for a model to be 0 at 1979 then don’t you have to vertically displace each dataset to make them intercept here? Aren’t we also assuming that each model should fit a linear best-fit line instead of some other curve? Many of these model lines look quite crazy, it’s not immediately apparent that a linear best-fit line is appropriate. What does this graph look like if we just plot the actual temperature predicted for each model?

2) Why Tropical Mid-Troposphere from 20S-20N?

Is there something more important about this range of latitudes and elevations? What happens if we look at a more comprehensive range of elevations and latitudes, does the picture change? Are these models only modeling this range? If not then is the data graphed here from these models restricted to this range? Is there somewhere we can access the data?

3) What is the ‘Observations’ data set?

The circles and squares seem to be defined differently than the model datasets. Why were they averaged instead of plotted as individual datasets like the rest of the models?

I think it would be great if the complete data set for these models and observations were freely available to all of us. I’m not sure the trendline forced intercept method of graphing these things is the best way to clarify things. I’d much prefer that we all have the full global dataset for each of the models and also many more observation sets so that we could all see exactly what is going on. Is there somewhere we can download this data?

Climate models are wrong because radiation does not transmit any “thermal energy” because it transmits electro-magnetic energy. When will people come to understand the difference?

The Sun’s radiated electromagnetic energy is converted to thermal energy in the far cooler surface. Back radiation’s electromagnetic energy is carried by waves that have far too low a range of frequencies and intensities for their EM energy to be converted to thermal energy in the warmer target.

Microwaves in your MW oven are also at far too low a frequency to warm anything by atomic absorption, so they are pseudo scattered and follow a random path through opaque plastic bowls without warming those bowls. But the Sun’s radiation would warm them. All that microwaves can do (if they are at the right frequency to resonate with water molecules) is to cause those molecules to rotate with each passing wave, generating thermal energy from a friction-like process that is nothing like atomic absorption.

Now, the Sun’s direct radiation cannot raise the Earth’s surface temperature to a mean of 288K. Nor can any radiation from the atmosphere.

The surface transfers more thermal energy to the atmosphere by conduction and evaporative cooling than by radiation. Hence radiation cannot possibly transfer all the energy that it would from a body with the same emissivity at the same temperature in space. Non-radiative processes have taken their slice of the cake. This means that it is not possible to calculate what the surface temperature “should” be for any particular radiative flux. The surface does not act remotely like a true blackbody, and you can’t just fudge the figures by changing emissivity, because non-radiative transfers would then also change.

It is even more obvious on Venus that direct radiation from the Sun could not raise the Venus temperature by 5 degrees each 4-month-long Venus day, from about 730K.

So if the Sun cannot raise the surface temperatures, then the whole concept of a “blanket” effect is irrelevant, because we have to ask (if the “blanket” is slowing surface cooling) from what temperature is it slowing such cooling? A vacuum flask will slow the cooling of your coffee, but it will never warm it. Furthermore, if the coffee wasn’t hot in the first place, the whole “slowing process” is next to being irrelevant.

There never was a need to invent a radiative forcing / greenhouse effect, because many physicists have known for many years that an autonomous thermal gradient evolves spontaneously in a gravitational field. This is quite sufficient to explain the observed temperatures on Earth and all planets, even beneath their surfaces in their crusts, mantles and perhaps cores.

Correct me if it’s wrong but would it have been appropriate for you to discuss what the “RCP 8.5″ is and represents, when it was developed and why, how it’s typically been used, and why you chose it instead of, say, RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, or RCP 6.0 ?

What have blackbody calculations got to do with determining Earth’s surface temperature? The surface loses two-thirds of its thermal energy to the atmosphere by non-radiative processes. Physics tells us that rate of cooling by non-radiative processes depends upon the temperature gap at the surface-atmosphere boundary.

But that energy transferred by conduction and evaporative cooling uses up two-thirds of the energy available for radiation. What’s more, if radiation transfer is slowed by back radiation, then non-radiative transfer is free to accelerate. How on Earth (or any planet like Venus for example) can you imagine that you can calculate what a surface temperature “ought” to be using Stefan-Boltzmann calculations that only apply for a blackbody in space?

The Earth’s surface is nothing remotely like a black body, and it also transfers heat further underground in the morning, and then gets it back from there at night, so it’s even more complicated.

The whole paradigm of radiative forcing of planetary surface temperatures is invalid. The surface temperature is “supported” by the temperature at the base of the atmosphere, and the latter is held in place by the gravitationally-induced temperature gradient, which evolves spontaneously as a result of the process described in modern statements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The gravity gradient (modified by inter-molecular radiation) can be used to calculate all observed or estimated atmospheric, surface, crust, mantle and core temperatures in our Solar System.

Thinkers responses seem rooted deep in conspiracy physics. I live in a high steps mountain environment. The atmosphere does not normally hold much water since it’s a semiarid environment and the altitude is around 6,500ft.

On a normal day the maximum temperature is usually around 2PM, this would support most of the heating from the surrounding ground and objects.

If it get cloudy after the period then the heat is held in, if not it rapidly cools at night as the heat radiates away.

If it snows the sun usually directly melts the snow where it touches the ground. In featureless area the snow stubbornly resists melting. Around grass tuff, exposed rock and tree trunk is where the snow first starts to melt. If I place a dark object in an unbroken covered area the snow melts around and under that object, the darker or blacker the better.

So I just don’t get this planet internal heat causing all the warming.

On the theory that gasses col the planet. To some extent this seem true but it may also rely on the nature of the gasses. Water in vapor form is liter then NO2 and therefore tends to rise or be buoyant. It’s the reason why clouds form and float above us.

Venus is almost pure CO2 but it’s density is about 97x that of Earths. When you go up altitude where the pressure is similar to Earths then the temperature is also that of the median of Earth’s. so on that evidence it’s atmospheric density that determines mean temperature. Keep in mind that there or SO2 clouds in that upper atmosphere and little sunlight reaches the surface.

So this whole CO2 forcing as the main warming event seem to be very bogus. Looking at the number you have 4 CO2 molecules out of 10,000 atmospheric molecules. Think of 4 agitators in a crowd of 10,000 pushing the others around, how much trouble could they cause?

“So this whole CO2 forcing as the main warming event seem to be very bogus. Looking at the number you have 4 CO2 molecules out of 10,000 atmospheric molecules. Think of 4 agitators in a crowd of 10,000 pushing the others around, how much trouble could they cause?”

Look at it this way – CO2 ( along with the other GHG’s ) are the Earth’s thermostat. It’s not the 400ppm that is important – it’s the fact that when there was 280ppm the thermostat was “off” over that it is “on”. The Earth’s climate was in balance – now it’s not. It’s irrelevant whether there’s 0.04% CO2 or 90%, it’s the balance point that is important.

Bogus science, CO2 does not run the earth’s thermostat, in fact, water vapor has more to do with that. Look at the differences in specific heat.

You are going by pseudo science. Looking at ancient geological history there is no direct correlation to CO2 content and temperature. The correlation you looking at is temperature increase of the oceans by solar heating causing out-gassing, look up solubility of gases. Human CO2 is less then 1% of that.

Even current levels show no significant influence in temperature as there has been no increase in that last 15~20 years. That’s what Spencer’s chart show, no hot spot developing in the tropics.

Venus is hot not due to CO2 makeup, but due to density of atmosphere. Look up Steve Goddard and Venus. The adiabatic lapse rate shows that.

Certainly not bogus, pseudo-science, my friend … established science. It what sane world would proven, consensus science be bogus?. No matter how much you may hand-wave you have not spotted that the Emperor is naked. Basic radiative physics, proven experimentally from early in the mid 19th century.
WV is the most important GHG, correct, but that too is in balance ( with temperature ). The relative humidity of the atmosphere staying the same but absolute humidity increasing as the temp does. CO2 therefore has a feed-back, hence the importance of that 0.04% and climbing. Ever heard of the hydrological cycle? Evaporation, condensation, rain/snow, repeat, repeat. WV has a lifetime of days in the atmosphere. CO2 centuries. It can only have an unbalanced effect when it can increase by following – not leading.
Geeological history shows CO2 in lock-step with temp. Yes, before mankind came along it followed rising temps ( post-glacial Milankovitch cycles ) as the positive feedback, until temp and CO2 were in balance. Now again it’s not – because of mankind.
The current hiatus is largely due to a series of La Nina’s, but probably with extra aerosol ( China ) input and a weak solar cycle(s). You see there are overlying cycles on top of the CO2 forcing. Surely you don’t think a complex system such as climate would exhibit an un-wiggling climb in global temp?
This graph to see how much the ENSO cycle affects global temp.http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/files/2012/04/1967withlines.pdf
In ’98 we were on the red trend line – since then we have been bumping along the blue one.
Meanwhile heat is being stored in the oceans…http://phys.org/news/2013-07-decade-unprecedented-deep-ocean.html
Re the DALR of an atmosphere and surface temperature. I refer you to a post from our host. Dr R Spencer…
“6) The tropospheric temperature lapse rate would not exist without the greenhouse effect. While it is true that convective overturning of the atmosphere leads to the observed lapse rate, that convection itself would not exist without the greenhouse effect constantly destabilizing the lapse rate through warming the lower atmosphere and cooling the upper atmosphere. Without the destabilization provided by the greenhouse effect, convective overturning would slow and quite possible cease altogether. The atmosphere would eventually become isothermal, as the full depth of the atmosphere would achieve the same temperature as the surface through thermal conduction; without IR emission, the middle and upper troposphere would have no way to cool itself in the face of this heating. This scenario is entirely theoretical, though, and depends upon the atmosphere absorbing/emitting absolutely no IR energy, which does not happen in the real world.”http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/01/misunderstood-basic-concepts-and-the-greenhouse-effect/

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Proof CO2 is not a greenhouse gas is that virtually NOTHING has been reducing it since the Global Warming industry began. Only France can claim to have reduced CO2 imperceptibly. As the principal country using clean nuclear energy and supplying other,anti nuclear, countries with it.
The Renewable Energy honeymoon is over in Europe. Shares in Renewable Energy companies have slumped 80% and some gone bankrupt. Denmark the showcase of Renewable Energy has proved disaster. The mas of turbines only producing the highest electricity cost in the world and not able to close ONE conventional power plant down. NO more Turbine being built, Holland decommissioning 90. Denmark, massive financial losses. Seling power at discount sometimes,buying at premium others.
The tiny Credit Capacity ( actual usable power ) of Wind & Solar make it farcical.But the public pay for the theoretical production. Paying for millions of non nexistent megawatts.
Spain’s Electricity Commission.A $34 billion hole with credits and subsidies to Renewable Energy. Britain waking up. Building a new Nuclear plant and more fossil fueled plants. Coal 2/3 times cheaper than Wind 5 times cheaper than Solar. China biggest maker of turbines and solar panel but only use 5% themselves. Current emissions nowhere near pre 1950′s. Then all homes, trains, factories many ships,coal. Now nuclear, electric furnaces plastics. pre 1950′s Europe’s city building black with soot and housewives had to watch the wind or get black coaldust on the sheets. D Dutton